


Hold Me Fast

by ModernWizard



Series: Alison Wonderland [2]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-05 03:14:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11569146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ModernWizard/pseuds/ModernWizard
Summary: Alison hasn't been aboard Anima, the Doctor's TARDIS, for very long, just about two months. She set a contract and specific limits with both the Doctor and their robot ["the Magister" to Alison, "the Master" to the Doctor], so now she feels more comfortable with them. She's her Magister's Domina, and he has sworn to protect her and keep her safe. She finally thought that, with a robot on her side, she could become the captain of her fate and the master of her soul. She'd never be mind-fucked again!...Except she is. It was a psychic vampire this time, an attack from which she also sustained a concussion. Something happened to her robot too. He's not around, and the Doctor isn't completely forthcoming about his condition. With the help of Scintilla, her robot's extremely perky and loquacious TARDIS, Alison searches for both answers and the robot. She learns a lot about herself, a lot about him, and a lot about the Doctor. This Domina/Magister thing also faces its first significant test.





	1. Alison Remembers Holding the Doctor

Alison remembers something that never happened to her:

 

She was younger, maybe in her mid-teens, and she sat on the floor of a granite mausoleum at night. Wind thrashed the trees outside. Lightning sent jaundiced moments of illumination through the diamond grilled windows. She held the Doctor in her arms.

 

Alison was freezing. Her clothes, sodden with mud and blood, dripped steadily. She felt like she was fusing to the mausoleum floor, which was as cold and wet as an iceberg. Though the Doctor covered much of her body with their own narrow, knobby form, they didn’t insulate her. They just gave her numb legs. The noise of her chattering teeth sounded through her skull, but she could not warm herself. She had wrapped her cloak around the Doctor, who was shivering even more than she.

 

Water -- or maybe blood -- trickled down her forehead, and she swiped it away before it hit the Doctor. She looked down on them. Just minutes ago, she had wrested them from their tormentors’ grasp, standing between the Doctor and almost certain death. She drew her power from her rage and lashed out at the assailants. So strong was her mental assault on them that they fell to their knees as they tried to obey her and vacate. Then, as they fled, her telekinetic power just happened to shift the foundation of a particularly unstable tomb. She didn’t intend for five of them to be crushed, but she can’t deny that it was worth it.

 

\--Because now she has the Doctor. She and they may both be among the Deca, the most avoided students of the academy, and even then among the Marks, the most despised subgroup of the Deca, but still the Doctor has been elusive till now. Whether they were perched in a tree, kneeling down in a flower bed, or carried away by a song, she could hold neither their eyes nor their mind nor their hearts. It wasn’t that they were looking at other people. It was just that they were two steps left of the communal reality.

 

She, someone who naturally commanded recognition, found the Doctor’s apparent obliviousness baffling and infuriated. For her, the worst thing in the universe, besides being told to _Use your words!,_ was being ignored. Thus, as much as she essayed to gain the Doctor’s notice, she hated them for refusing her satisfaction.

 

And so she had begun to torment the Doctor. The Marks jealously protected each other from torment from outside their clique so that they alone might have the joy of making each other suffer. Mostly the Marks tortured each other collectively, each drawing on their particular expertise. She, gifted with psychic powers of the most compelling strength, might make her fellow Marks feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to destroy their final term projects in advanced temporal distortion. The Doctor, whose voice could allegedly rearrange matter on a subatomic level, could inflict the other Marks with off-key tinnitus that drove them all to desperate insomnia and near failure on their orals. Such generic excruciation, though, did not fit her plans.

 

For the Doctor she devised particularly personal persecutions. She began by targeting their precious musical skills. While they were playing in the dirt [yet again] one day, she whispered to them: _Forget your perfect pitch. Forget too what you have lost, and come to me only in your extremity. Beg me on your knees to restore you. I am your Master, and you will obey me._

 

And, oh, they did everything exactly as she said, losing the key to their voice and thus their power to do anything through song. They panicked over the absence, certain that they were heading for delirium, yet unable to identify what they so sorely missed. Soon they came to her weeping. And, oh, they groveled before her with such abjection that she knew that she had struck true fear in their hearts, and it was wonderful.

 

Naturally the Doctor took their revenge shortly after. She awoke one morning to discover herself pinned to her mattress. The Doctor, who stood over her, humming a wordless and somehow ominous little tune, had convinced the ivy to crawl from the outer walls of their dormitory into her bedroom, where it bound her to her bed. She tried to exercise her psychic powers, but the Doctor had strewn dried mensimaza buds around the room, the pungent scent of which rendered her abilities useless. She was about to cry out, but the Doctor slapped some sticky wet leaf thing over her mouth, sealing it off, then left, still humming jauntily. With nothing else to do, she shut down all but her most essential functions and launched herself off into a pleasant sort of dreamland coma. The end of this state would be triggered in a day or two, surely, when the Doctor gave her back either movement, speech, or psychic abilities.

 

She swam back up to full consciousness and found her body and her room devoid of all invasive flora. There was the Doctor, still lurking, but with significantly long hair and darker circles under their eyes. Connecting with the nearest available psychic chronometer, she learned that she had been out for over a month. She had been powerless, wordless, penetrable, violable, and at the Doctor’s mercy: in short, unmastered. She was afraid then with a naked terror, but only for a second, yet still the Doctor saw. They had taken no advantage of her beyond observation, and she had essentially called their bluff with her coma, forcing them to let her go. Still...all she could think of was that she had been recognized and known.

 

Thus began their game. They learned what they could of each other and then subjected one another to trials that exploited each other’s worst fears. As much as they dreaded the quiet between attacks, as much as the torments filled them with fright, as much as they fell into prostration after the passage of each event, they couldn’t give up the game. They each lived for those moments when they were opened, bared, conquered by the other and, most of all, comprehended. Both of them had grown up lonely: the Doctor, universally dismissed as a melodramatic, fatuous dolt, and she, who had from her earliest days been told by all outside her family that she was _born wrong._ For them the feeling of being known was a novel intoxication.

 

They soon had thorough acquaintance with each other’s worries, fears, griefs, panics, and furies, yet they remained unsatisfied. They knew without much conversation that they each longed for something more. They wanted to be laid open by the other not just to their pains, but to their joys, their prides, and their ambitions. She wanted to make the Doctor drunk not only on her incapacities and her mistakes, but on her wonder, her strength, and her mastery.

 

And so tonight she had saved the Doctor. Five bullies had planned to culminate days of petty harassment with a night of terrorism, but she was ready for them. One bully struck a light to incinerate the Doctor’s latest score. As the Doctor tried and failed to tackle their tormentor, she teleported the sheets safely to her hands while burning the flesh from the tormentor’s own. Another bully tried to garrote the Doctor on a creeping vine from their garden. She unwove the vine from about the Doctor without unrooting it. Then she pitched the culprit headfirst into the trunk of the Doctor’s sugar star tree. Whatever the bullies did, she and the Doctor undid.

 

The struggle continued as rain blew in, mounting to a storm. The quintet of tormentors refused to yield. She finally led the Doctor into her favorite cemetery. She hoped to lose the persecutors among its menacing angels and hollow mausoleums, but still the bullies persisted. Exhausted, exasperated, and enraged, she finally pushed the shaking Doctor behind her and ended the tormentors for good.

 

When the two withdrew to the mausoleum, the Doctor was failing in her arms, shaking with cold, wheezing with asthmatic breaths. She did not know but that they might die. If they did, they might regenerate into someone who did not know who she was, how necessary she was to them. And so she reached out, with her arms and her voice and her mind and her hearts, and told them who they were and what to do: _You belong to me, for I am the only one who knows you, in strength and in weakness, in good and in ill, in joy and in pain. Thus I possess you entirely, and you shall always stay with me. I am your Master, and you are mine._

 

The Doctor’s breathing gentled then, and they obeyed her and lived. Their long face turned toward her, as sharp and pale white and brilliant as the lightning around them. Their hair, peaked at the height of their narrow forehead, darkened to a soil-like black from the leftover raindrops. Their eyes were light blue, as soft as the center of certain flowers, as limitless as the sky. When they smiled and those pointy eyebrows lifted in recognition, she needed no psychic insight to understand that they too knew her just as completely, not only for her fears and her failures, but for her brilliance and mastery as well. And now they answered her with lines from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, one of the Earthlings that gave them voice when they struggled to concatenate sentences: _So true a fool is love that, in your will, / Though you do anything, I feel no ill._

 

Cold and wetness mattered nothing to her then. All her life, she had been seeking power, control, certainty. She had believed herself magical when very young, endowed with the gifts of strength and survival. Naturally, as she grew older, she dismissed such superstitious nonsense for the concrete realities of silence. Nevertheless, she still believed that magic existed, that there was some irrational, inexplicable, wonderful essence in the universe, the knowledge of which would give her ultimate power and joy.

 

Now, at last, she had found the truth. Magic did exist, and, as she surmised, it satisfied her completely. And what was the source of such fabulous power? Quite simply, it was this: the full possession of one’s truest desire.


	2. Alison Regains Consciousness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison comes to in hospital. The Doctor explains that they're just going to poke around in her mind. Alison flees.

Alison slowly rises toward consciousness. “Um, where’s my robot?” she mutters.

 

“Uh… You’ve got lots of dolls,” replies a voice, somewhere between alto and tenor.

“No!” Alison starts to shake her head, but her head throbs when she does that. “My robot.”

 

“Oh! Sure! I know what you mean. I’ll be right back.” The person dashes away, returning several minutes later with something that they press into her hands. “This one?”

 

It’s a tinplate robot, thirty centimeters high, that she got as a birthday present. “No, this one’s from my parents.” Turning her head, she sees the Doctor. She recognizes them, of course, but still the thoughts are cohering with difficulty. “I want  _ my _ robot.”

The Doctor’s face scrunches, one sharply angled eyebrow going up. “Maybe I’m missing something -- and I probably am because I frequently do -- but, uh, I don’t think you have a robot.”

Glancing from side to side, Alison registers that she’s not in her room, but in a place of rainbows. The spectrums of light in this strange area fade, seep, and merge like watercolors just touched by a wet paintbrush. Are they in the Time Vortex? No, for the rainbows here shift in time with her heartbeat, along with the dull ache beating in her skull. But...where is she then? And how can she just be hovering in midair, like she’s in an invisible bed? And why is the Doctor insisting that she doesn’t have a robot? Why doesn’t anything make sense? “I do have a robot!” She raises her voice. “He’s mine, and he holds me fast.”

 

“I’m definitely missing something.” Sitting next to her [in an invisible chair?], the Doctor passes their hands through their thinning black hair. The silver blazes above their ears fall forward in loose locks, brushing their hollowed cheeks. “What does your robot look like? Maybe I can help you find it.”

“What do you mean?” She squints at the Doctor. “You know what he looks like. His face… It flickers like fire, always changing. Fucking ridiculous eyebrows. Sparks, like amber sparks, in his eyes when he’s happy. Wears black all the time.”

“Oh. Oh!” The Doctor bounces up, eyes widening. “Do you mean the Master?”

“No, my Magister! Where is he?”

The Doctor sits back down, their voice dropping as well. “I’m so confused. What do you mean -- he’s yours?”

“I mean, he said,  _ I am yours, _ and I said,  _ Stupendissimus!” _ Literally  _ most stupendous _ in Latin, the term now serves as Alison’s polysyllabic equivalent for  _ cool. _

“Yours?” The Doctor’s eyebrows fall. “Really? But... I...thought…” They look down. “I thought you... I hoped that you...that we…” They raise their eyes to her, clenching their fists at their chest, then opening them slowly, like two flowers. Alison remembers that they did the same thing when she first came aboard. They were talking to her robot about how she was made of sunshine; they hoped that she would make their hearts bloom. “--That he...was…” Their hands crumple. “He was… He is... He’s  _ mine.” _ That possessive comes out in a small, but definite, almost defiant voice.

“Yeah, I know that,” Alison says softly. The Doctor looks like they need to be held fast. “He’s totally yours. I know that; you know that, and so does anyone who looks at you two for longer than a microsecond. I’m not taking him away from you. He’s still yours, and he’s always gonna be.”

 

“But…” Dropping their face to their palms, the Doctor presses the heels of their hands into their eye sockets and rubs. They again rake their fingers through their hair, which now resembles a collapsed haystack. “He’s yours too?” 

“Yeah, but not in the same way,” says Alison. The last time she tried to hold the Doctor fast, they poked her, like they didn’t know where to arrange themselves. She reaches out and wraps her right hand around one of their fists clenched on their knee. Something drags lightly on her hand, like she’s attached to something, but she ignores it. “I’m not taking him away from you; don’t worry! Besides, we aren’t doing anything like that weird kinky shit you two do.”

 

The Doctor jerks to attention, nearly pulling free of Alison’s grasp. “I should hope not! That would be breaking your contract; he wouldn’t be keeping you safe and whole and happy at all! --He  _ is _ following the contract, isn’t he?”

 

“Well, yeah. I told him to.” Alison thinks about it. “Okay, well, I guess it is pretty kinky. But it’s not that sort of violent, manipulative games you can play because you can read each other’s minds and control each other’s bodies and not automatically kill each other.”

“You do kinky stuff with the Mas -- ?”

“No!” Alison cries, making the Doctor jump a second time. “I know that that’s his name, but that’s not what he is to me. I’m sorry I yelled, but, whenever you ask me about him and use his name, it drags up all sorts of oppressive, racist, sexist, horrible shit that I am never going to be a part of.” 

 

“Oh no! Oh dear!” Yanking away from her, the Doctor claps a hand to their cheek. “I’m sorry! Oh no...so...then...every time I say his name…?” What little color they have drains from their face, rendering them the pallor of skim milk. 

 

“It’s okay!” Alison holds up her hands. “It’s just, when you’re talking about him in relation to me, can you please call him something else?” 

 

“Like  _ the robot?” _

 

“Well, to me, he’s the Magister, and it means _teacher,”_ says Alison, who sees the Doctor opening their mouth to correct her and adds, “And don’t argue with me.”

“I wasn’t going to argue with you. I was just going to say that that was one of his pseudonyms in the 1970s. Or wait...was it the 1980s? That period around my third regeneration is always a little fuzzy.”

 

“Oh please!” Alison rolls her eyes. “That’s not a pseudonym. That’s an actual-onym. Why would he do that?”

“Well, sometimes I have difficulty seeing things unless they’re right under my nose. He had to make sure I noticed him.” The Doctor shrugs. “--Kinky like how then?” they ask. 

 

“What?”

 

“You said you do kinky stuff with the Mas -- Magister. Like what?”

 

Alison closes her eyes. A description of what they do would encompass nothing. She says,  _ Mi Magistre, obey me, _ and he does. He tells her,  _ Tace, mea Domina carissima, _ and she is silent, and then he holds her. Put that way, their activities sound trivial, useless, ineffectual. In such a description, there’s none of the charge borne by formal titles and Latin imperatives that turn simple actions into magical transfigurations. There’s no sense of encompassing thrill and deep tranquility that comes from trusting someone enough to do with them something that you’d never do with anyone else in the universe. There’s no amazing electric shift of giving your power to someone...and then feeling that same shift again as they give theirs to you. There’s none of that strictly bounded freedom.

 

With a sigh, she opens her eyes. “Did he ever tell you his theory on obedience: compelled versus consensual? Compelled is based on mind-fucking someone, with or without psychic powers. There’s no self in it because the people who are being compelled are being overruled. Also the person who’s doing the compelling has no energy left from imposing their will all the time. Consensual obedience, though, doesn’t use mind-fucking; instead the people agree on their terms together. They bring their personalities and selves to the whole thing. They exchange power voluntarily. I think that would be a fair description of what we’re doing, but the obedience goes both ways. Alison thinks for a bit. “Huh… I always thought I was more of a sub, but I guess  _ switch _ would be a more accurate -- Oh fuck, I just said that out loud, didn’t I?”

 

“What?” The Doctor, tapping and swiping on a tablet, glances up. “Sorry...I lost you after the obedience going both ways. What were you saying?”

 

For once Alison feels grateful for the Doctor’s abrupt shifts in attention. “Absolutely nothing of any importance whatsoever,” she says emphatically. Craning her neck, she tries to see the Doctor’s screen. “What are you doing?”

 

“Checking your vitals. You -- “

 

“Wait...what?” Taking in her surroundings again, Alison now sees and feels an intravenous needle piercing the back of her right hand, held there by surgical tape. So that’s what was pulling on her earlier when she held the Doctor’s hand. “Am I...in hospital?”

 

“Oh no, this is better!” The Doctor bounds to their feet. “My ship has always had a Zero Room for accelerated physical and mental restoration, but that’s for Time Lords only… Well, just for me now, since I fix the Master in my lab. --But anyway, I always thought that I should have one for humans, seeing as how I hang out with you lot quite frequently, and so… Here we are!” They spin around, arms outstretched. “You’re the first patient, and everything’s going splendidly! Your vitals -- “

 

“Patient? What? What’s wrong with me?” Alison’s voice climbs in pitch and volume.

 

“Well, pretty much nothing now,” says the Doctor with a broad smile. “Because of the healing coma -- “

 

“I was in a coma?”

 

“--The worst symptoms -- “

 

“Symptoms?”

 

“--Resolved in mere hours, instead of days, and now all that’s left is to fix your brain -- “

 

The Doctor might claim this isn’t a hospital room, but it is. If she’s up from a  _ healing coma,  _ whatever that is, attached to an IV, and talking with a fucking doctor about her vitals, she’s in hospital, even if it’s filled with rainbows. And she knows about hospitals. They aren’t places where you go to become well. They’re processing plants to turn live people into dead meat. They smell sour and sharp; her gram said it was the bleach, but she knew it was the despair. It was that same despair that killed her gram; she went to hospital after breaking her hip, but, once there, the rest of her just broke down too. She came out dead, in pieces, a jar of ash.

 

Alison shrieks...or maybe she roars. Whatever sort of sound it is, it breaks free from her throat with as much force as she bolts from the invisible bed. The IV needle yanks out of the back of her hand as the surrounding rainbows pick up the tempo in time with her racing heart. She runs for the door.

 

Leaving the hospital room, she hurtles down a long, dark hallway. “Alison, wait!” the Doctor calls after her. She wastes no breath in response, though, as she’s trying to find a place to hide.

 

“Mistress!” a voice cries, as if seeing Alison is the person’s dream come true. “Oh, it’s you; it’s you; finally, it’s you! Hello, Mistress!”

 

Alison stops short, her headache drumming. She scans the hall. “Anima?” she asks, using her verbal translation of the image by which the Doctor calls their TARDIS.

 

“No, no, silly Mistress; I’m not the Doctor’s ship. I’m the Master’s TARDIS and yours!” says the voice. “See the clock on your right? That’s me.” Swinging to the right, Alison catches sight of a grandfather clock, at least three and a half meters high, as wide as a standard door. It might be a Gothic cathedral to Time itself for all the ornate pilasters, lance-like finials, and scrollwork carved into its glossy mahogany. Stepping closer, Alison sees that two figures, a Grim Reaper and a maiden, chase each other around the perimeter of the broad gilded dial. The streaming hair and tattered black robes of both figures make them difficult to differentiate. 

 

The plate glass portal on the front of the clock swings open, and the voice issues forth: “I’m so happy! The Master told me to expect you, but I never expected that I would expect you so soon. This is great! Now I can show you everything, and we can be friends. Please, please, please, Mistress, come on in!”

 

Without hesitation, Alison leaps into the clock, pulling the door shut behind her.

  
  
  



	3. Alison Meets Scintilla

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison meets Scintilla, the Magister's TARDIS. She also learns about her quarters, Scintilla's relationship with the Magister, and what his mental image of himself looks like.

Alison tumbles into a bedroom. It’s a square space, maybe five meters by five, with high ceilings. Three of four walls have built-in bookcases in vibrant blond wood sealed with a clear stain to show up the grain. She can even smell the pungent, slightly sticky odor of the sealant, as if it has been recently applied. A carpet of black and white checks covers the floor, padded enough to sink comfortably under her feet.

 

“Welcome to your chambers, Mistress!” says the Magister’s ship, nearly singing. “I’m so glad that you’re finally here! This is so exciting! I’ve been waiting to meet you for months! I hope you’ll be my friend!”

 

Alison drops into an upholstered chair of dark ochre, its seat as plump and rounded as a mushroom top. “I… Can we please start at the beginning? Who are you?”

 

“I’m the yours and the Master’s ship! I’m so excited! I’ve spent so much time preparing for you! I hope you like what me and him did for your quarters!” The ship’s voice skips along lightly, moving as quickly as a brook. “I should probably say  _ the Master and I, _ right? He keeps telling me that my grammar’s abominable. Of course, then I keep telling him that his temper’s abominable...except for now. He’s been way much more happier since he got a Mistress, and of course he’s been because it was  _ my _ idea, after all, that he should get you. I always told him he needed some more people besides just a Doctor, but he really likes to pretend that he knows best, even though he obviously doesn’t. 

 

“Anyway, this is amazing; I can’t believe it,” the ship goes on. “You’re finally here! I’m finally meeting you and making friends with you. I like you already...from what the Master has told me about you. I hope you like me too, Mistress! We can be good friends, right?”

 

Alison leans back in the chair, rubbing her forehead in an attempt to reduce the pain. “Yeah, but...what’s your name?”

 

“Well, my actual name is a telepathic image, not a spoken word, but I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry, Mistress. The Master said I should never talk to you telepathically because then you would hate me, but I want you to be my friend. I guess you could call me what the Master does when he talks to me out loud, which -- “

 

Somehow Alison finds the chance to slip a comment in: “Oh...he talks to you like this -- like we’re doing? I thought Time Dorks and TARDISes just had psychic links, like the Magister and the Doctor!”

 

“Hah! Time Dorks! That’s wonderful, Mistress! You would make a good TARDIS. You see the Time Lords -- Time  _ Dorks _ \-- for what they are. They’re mostly wonderful people, and we have lots of fun with them, but they’re also very, very silly and way too serious about themselves. Like the Master is one of the most Time Lordiest Time Dorks ever; my friends can’t believe the stories I tell about what he gets up to. I don’t mean like the killing and taking over and blowing stuff up ‘cause that’s mean; I’m talking about the really goofy stuff like saying that he’s  _ usually referred to as the Master...universally. _ Isn’t that silly?” The ship, of course, doesn’t wait for Alison’s answer, but instead continues on: “It’s especially silly because, when he said it, only people on Gallifrey were buzzing about  _ that pompous gasbag who calls himself the Master like he’s some sort of latter-day Rassilon.  _

 

“But yeah, he talks to me a lot, especially since his robotification,” says the ship, returning at long last to Alison’s question. “Either he really likes the sound of his own voice, or he’s really lonely since we got trapped here. Probably both. He definitely loves the sound of his own voice. 

 

“I also know that you’re the first person who’s ever really paid attention to him and didn’t think that he belonged to the Doctor instead of the other way around. Silly humans, thinking that he belonged to the Doctor! The Doctor belongs to the Master, and the Master belongs to me...and you, Mistress. He told me he belongs to you too. He was very clear on that; I can’t have him all to myself anymore. I have to share him with you, Mistress, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem because we can all be friends, right?”

 

Alison’s head starts to whirl. Listening to the Magister’s ship is different from listening to your usual obliviously loquacious person. Alison feels as if she’s hearing someone’s thoughts translated without premeditation from electrochemical impulses to words. Well, since the ship is used to communicating directly to the Magister, mind to mind, perhaps her spoken idiom reflects her mental stream of consciousness. Alison decides not to conduct any further such analyses, as that one took entirely too much energy. “Um, what did you say your name was?”

 

The Magister’s ship explains that her telepathic name shows her shooting across the sky so quickly that she is but a streak of light. Therefore, in speech, she goes by  _ Scintilla, _ the Latin for  _ spark. _

 

While on the subject of names, Alison also says that she cannot be addressed as  _ Mistress. _ For her the word has objectionable connotations of either a sexual partner or woman who owns people. Alison’s desire for informality combines with Scintilla’s insistence on the opposite, leading to the compromise address of  _ Miss Alison. _

 

Alison realizes that the wound on the back of her hand where the IV punctured her is still leaking some blood. She asks Scintilla for a bandage. Scintilla supplies one and asks how she was injured. Alison says tersely that the Doctor hospitalized her and put her in a coma without her permission. Then they tried to mind-fuck her, so she had to run away. She quickly switches the subject and asks about these quarters that she apparently now has in the Magister’s ship. 

 

Scintilla gladly delivers a long-winded answer. She provides a safe and private place for the Magister to live where even the Doctor may not trespass. She thought that the Magister’s Domina too would enjoy a similar space. She and the Magister do not expect Alison to move in with them. Instead they envision her quarters as a place of refuge. “You know, someplace where me and the Master could keep you safe and whole and happy,” Scintilla says. “I was thinking of it while I designed it as  _ the Mistress’ -- _ I mean,  _ Miss Alison’s Hideaway.” _

 

During Scintilla’s monologue, Alison explores the rest of her quarters, discovering an ensuite bathroom behind one set of louvered sliding doors; behind another, there’s a closet with enough built-in racks and drawers to accommodate more clothes than she has ever owned. She counts the number of Latin reference books [seven] and Andrew Lang’s  _ Fairy Books _ [all of them] on the bookcases. Then she swings around one of the polished brass poles of the twin bed. The drapery of pale yellow and burnt orange organza sways. “Four-poster canopy fairy-tale bed -- wheee! I could sail away on this fuckin’ thing!” She plunks down on the mattress. “Oooh, a little too much twirling; I’m dizzy. Eeeee, this is brilliant! I have a secret hideaway! Thank you!”

 

Scintilla gasps, then laughs in delight. “The Master was right! You do bounce and glow!”

 

“Oh God, he told you about all my weird little habits? That’s embarrassing.”

 

“No no. It’s just that, whenever you appear in his mind, there’s a light coming out from inside you, hovering around your skin. It’s like you’re regenerating or maybe made out of the Time Vortex, always full of light, always becoming beautiful. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in his mind. Hmmm…” Scintilla falls silent with a happy sigh. “Every time he thinks about you, you’re up on the balls of your feet, almost jumping off the ground, but not quite. And now I know why -- because you really do bounce!”

 

Alison presses her hand to her forehead. “Shit, it sounds like he sees me as a radioactive frog or something.”

 

“Oh no no no, Miss Alison. I was just trying to say that the Master loves you very, very much. You look inside his head exactly as you do in real life, and he loves you exactly as you are.”

 

“No, he loves the Doctor,” Alison corrects. 

 

“Yes, I know. He thinks of you and the Doctor in the same way. The Doctor is always bouncing in his mind too, wearing gardening clothes and conducting with a weed fork. And they have music coming out of them and hovering all around them instead of sunshine, but it’s the same thing really. And he just  _ adores  _ them.” If Scintilla had a human shape, she would be spinning around on one foot as she said that with a sigh. “That’s how I know he adores you too!”

 

He adores her? How? They’ve only known each other like two months. And why? Their entire relationship consists of her getting mind-fucked and him trying to keep her from going to pieces. That’s not the basis for a healthy relationship at all. She deflects with sarcasm: “So, if he does that for the people he adores, then there must be a little image of himself, right, probably striding around with its hands behind its back, emanating words, maybe holding a pen?”

 

“No… His image of himself is...not bouncy and shiny at all. It’s very old...and sad.” Scintilla’s gaiety subsides, and she is still.

 

Alison can tell by the silence that she has hit a sensitive subject. Her curiosity won’t quit, though. “Um...can I see it, please, if you don’t mind?”

 

“Well,” Scintilla says, “he did say that this was to be your home as much as his and that I was to trust you as much as I do him, so I… I’ll put it on a monitor.”

 

A screen comes down on the other side of the room by the closet doors. Alison walks to it, looking at the person shown. The figure, who leans on a walking stick, appears gravely, perhaps terminally, ill, if not close to death. He hides his body beneath hooded black robes, his face beneath a mask of smooth mahogany. The eyes are the same as the Magister’s now, brown, overshadowed by a deep brow, but the amber in them is extinct. He has the hunched posture of someone on whom time has pulled hard. 

 

Body entirely cloaked and hands gloved, he exposes only the lower part of his face. His narrow lips and prominent, unpadded chin resemble those on any elderly person who has lost youthful subcutaneous fat. But his skin is unusual, as fragile and mottled as paper birch bark, torn in many places, yet bloodless. Furthermore, the lines from the outer edges of his mouth run so long and deep down his face that the frowning set of his lips seems engraved on his very bones.

 

“Uh, did he used to look like this?” Alison turns away from the screen and looks up at the ceiling. “Or is this something where he’s turned all the pain and guilt he’s feeling into a metaphorical disability? Because, if it is, we’re going to have a serious talk about -- “

 

“No, that’s him...at the end of his regeneration cycle.” Scintilla’s voice is lower and slower now. “He didn’t love the Doctor then, or else he loved them too much and began to hate them. He blamed the Doctor for all his failures and misery. By all rights, he should have been permanently dead, but I think it was only his stubbornness and his hatred keeping him alive.”

 

“What happened to him?”

 

“He doesn’t remember, and I’m not much help either. He was in so much pain from the constant decay that, even though his intellect wasn’t rotting, his memories and his senses were affected.”

 

Something flashes on top of the figure’s head. Coming within a few inches of the screen, Alison sees a metal loop thrusting from the top center of his skull. A wire extends from the loop and up out of frame. Two similar wired loops pierce the back of the figure’s hands. Alison shivers hard enough to chatter her jaw. “I’m gonna take a wild guess and say he was tortured. He’s got fucking aerials jammed into his head and hands!” 

 

“What? Oh, those. No, those are completely, totally metaphorical.”

 

“Okay, I think my brain isn’t fully awake because those still look like torture devices to me.”

 

“They’re marionette strings. And it’s a metaphor in English too -- I know it is -- to  _ be someone’s puppet. _ Besides, those only appeared after his robotification, and I don’t care what he thinks he’s the Master of these days; he has never been the Master of Subtlety.”

 

“Ouch.” Alison rubs the crown of her skull in sympathy. The headache returns, pulsing regularly. She rotates away from the monitor, but too fast. Alison’s thigh bumps the bed, and she collapses clumsily on the mattress. It’s thankfully immovable, and she splays her arms out, clinging to it.

 

“Miss Alison!” cries Scintilla. “What’s wrong?”

 

“Umph.” Alison closes her eyes. Waking up in hospital, learning she’d been comatose, having the Doctor about to mind-fuck her, running away, meeting Scintilla, seeing what the Magister thinks of himself -- all of these events drop upon her with the heaviness of a curtain at play’s end. “Tired -- suddenly. Dizzy. Nap -- I need a nap…” And she falls down further into sleep.


	4. The Magister Leaves a Message

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison finds a message that her robot left her.

Alison wakes a few hours later from dreams about being chased by giant vacuum cleaners. She can’t settle her thoughts enough to go back to sleep, so she explores the contents of her bookshelves. Finding a slim, silver tablet computer, she wonders if she can get online to Earth networks. She does so without difficulty in Anima, though the connection seems to take forever, but maybe Scintilla isn’t equipped for companions wishing to communicate with their home planet.

 

She hesitates, her finger over the power button. She told the same story to everyone in her small social circle [her parents, Sylvie, doll club, people from the kink community]. Bored out of her mind, she had signed up for an six-week intensive course in experimental applications of sonic technology offered at the [nonexistent] Lannet campus of Sheffield Hallam University. She had no interest in the subject when she began, but it was something to do.

 

While in the crash course, Alison met two other students -- you know, those  _ lifelong learner _ types that never manage to graduate because they love academia. One of them was pursuing doctorates in musicology and botany, even though they already had so many doctorates that everyone called them  _ the Doctor _ [although they mostly appeared as  _ D _ in Alison’s messages] _. _ Their spouse was called  _ the Magister [M _ in Alison’s letters] because he could not stop teaching people Latin and grammar. His own studies lay in the disturbing reaches of abnormal psychology. The three met by chance, but soon became inseparable; in fact, none of them would have survived the course if it hadn’t been for the friendship of the others.

 

Alison, M, and D barely passed the sonic tech course, then looked around for other opportunities. Despite the grueling experience, Alison rediscovered her old curiosity and passion for learning. She left Lannet to resume her studies at Sheffield Hallam. Her dual studies in classics and history made her eligible for a unique, multidisciplinary study abroad program. M and D, already accepted in the program, encouraged her to apply, and she too won a place. For at least the next two terms, she would be traveling all over, studying things that just couldn’t be taught in a lecture hall.

 

So far Alison has been successfully feeding everyone back on Earth lies, but the thought of pretending now fills her with fatigue. Clambering back onto her bed, she figures that she’ll just find some sites to surf mindlessly instead. Bolstering herself on some pillows, she clicks on the tablet.

 

The screen comes up with a mid-length shot of the Magister sitting at a table. “Hello, D -- Imp!” His greeting cuts off as a black blur descends from above and sits right in front of the tablet, blocking out most of Alison’s view. “I’m trying to record here. Kindly remove yourself from in front of the camera.”

 

At this, the actual Imp, who has been snoozing on Alison’s bed canopy, flies down and does the exact opposite of the Magister’s instructions. She inspects the screen, then glances at Alison, and makes a trill that obviously means, “[Yes, that’s me! Don’t I look good?]” After polishing all edges of the tablet with the sides of her face, she flutters to Alison’s lap and begins to polish Alison.

 

Meanwhile, televised Imp objects to the Magister’s command. 

 

“I just cleaned and refilled your drinking fountain not three minutes ago,” the Magister objects. 

 

Televised Imp, just like a person who’s not being either heard or understood, repeats the same thing, only louder and crabbier. 

 

“There’s nothing wr -- “

 

Televised Imp says the definite feline equivalent of, “[Yes, there is!]”

 

The Magister sighs, reaching toward the camera. There’s a jump cut, and he’s in front of the camera again, unobstructed. “The fountain setting was on  _ high,” _ he explains, rolling his eyes. “The Imperatrix required her staff to change it to  _ low.” _

 

Despite her limpness, Alison giggles.

 

“I thought that might make you smile,” the Magister says with a broad grin of his own. “That’s why I left it in.

 

“Anyway...my dear…” He clasps his hands in front of him. “You’re watching this because you have found your quarters in my ship, but, for some reason, I am not there to show you about. I must say… I’m truly disappointed in myself to have neglected such an important duty. I apologize for eventually disobeying you in the future.” He shakes his head, as if he’s dealing with Imp again.

 

Alison snickers some more. Real-life Imp finishes designating Alison as hers and starts bonking her head against Alison’s hand. She scritches the cat, who kneads the burnt purple counterpane and flicks her wings with pleasure.

 

On the screen, one of the Magister’s eyebrows mounts, its curve echoed by that of the wrinkles on his forehead. “You think this is funny, do you? Please know that I will be having words with myself about this shameful lapse. After all, what’s the point of having a robot if he’s not there to hold you fast?” He winks.

 

Alison stops laughing. He must have a reason for being gone, but she really, really wants him back.

 

“In any event,” the Magister goes on, “you’ve seen your rooms, and you’ve met Scintilla. I assume that she has, in her inimitably loquacious way, both apprised you of necessities and overwhelmed you with trivial details.” He chuckles. 

 

“Do please be patient with her. Remember that she, besides being rather excitable by nature, has no great acquaintance with other biological -- well, previously biological, in my case -- persons besides myself. She knows a vast amount of information about humans and their ways, but much of it she has never put into practice. 

 

“When she offends you or does something wrong, she almost certainly does so out of ignorance. In such a case, I would be very grateful if you explained to her calmly her mistake and the appropriate alternative. She will, of course, be distressed to upset you, but she will immediately correct. 

 

“So treat Scintilla with frankness, patience, and a sense of humor. She particularly likes jokes at my expense,” he adds, “so you will certainly endear yourself to her with comments about my nonexistent follies and foibles. You will find her a loyal ally, one who will keep your secrets, guard you from harm, and do everything within her power to help you. More than that…” He looks down, thinking for a moment, then raises his eyes back to the camera and nods with certainty. “You shall be friends -- good friends.”

 

“Yeah,” says Alison with a little smile. “We are -- already.”

 

“Excellent!” the Magister exclaims. “Now then... I do not know if Scintilla said so, but I wish you to know this explicitly. This is your home as much as mine, not only your chambers, but the entire ship.” 

 

“Wait… Are you serious?” 

 

“Everything is yours, and nothing is forbidden.” 

 

“So I could just like take your books and write notes in the margins and fold over pages?”

 

The Magister gasps, pressing a hand to the side of his face. “How could you even think of such a thing? Ahem. While you certainly could do something like that, you won’t. Nothing is forbidden because I trust your prudence and good judgment.”

 

Putting his hands back on the table, he cocks his head and hushes his voice with some gravity. “Now please tell me, my dear -- how do you feel right now? Are you content, anxious, exhausted? Are you angry, grieving, confused, excited, happy? I ask because I have recorded different messages depending on your response.”

 

“Um…” Alison, feeling a lump in her throat, swallows harshly. “I… Um…” Scooting out from under Alison’s hand, Imp parks in her lap and starts purring loudly, attempting to keep her calm with a force field of cat noises.

 

After a few seconds, the Magister smiles gently. “You do need to say something, though. After all, I can’t read your mind.”

 

“I feel like shit!” Alison bursts out. “My head hurts, and the Doctor tried to mind-fuck me, and I have no idea where you are. I’m tired, and I’m sick, and I’m hurting, and I’m really, really, really… I’m scared,” she says, her voice falling to a whisper. “So scared I want to...want to...want to cry. But I can’t.”

 

Imp meeps at her: “[What? The purrs aren’t working?]” Standing up and turning to face Alison, she rocks from side to side, kneading with concentration, as if determined to help via massage.

 

There’s another jump cut. In this new scene, the Magister bows his head, staring at his interlocked fingers. Then he finally meets the camera again. “If that’s the case, then something truly awful must have happened to make you as miserable as you felt after the Shalka. When you came to me then, you were full of such desperation and despair that…” He lowers his eyelids part of the way, unable to end that sentence. “Anyway,” he goes on, with a deliberate shake of the shoulders to restore composure, “I must be unable to come to you. I presume then that I am either destroyed -- “

 

“What? No! You can’t be destroyed; the Doctor would have been incoherent. You’re just...lost.”

 

“--Or, more likely, injured and therefore switched off. --Hopefully all the way,” the Magister says, with an annoyed glare to the side, “as the old fool does have a tendency to shut off my mobility without remembering to shut off my consciousness. Or they’ll shut off my mobility and just part of my consciousness, which -- ugh!” He lets out a sound of exasperation. “If you ever require robotification, my dear, I strongly recommend a much more efficient and intuitively linked set of power controls than those that the Doctor improvised for me. I really must have them modify these so that such partial states are not so easily generated.” His eyebrows wiggle as he thinks, momentarily distracted.

 

There’s a few seconds of silence. “Listen to me, my dear,” the Magister resumes, holding up his right hand. “I know that you’re terrified, in pain, and full of doubt. I would be there if I could, of course, but I’m obviously not. In my absence, though, remember that you have Scintilla. Remember that you have the Doctor. I know that neither is your robot, but both are your friends. Perhaps they may not hold you fast, as do I, but they too want you safe and whole and happy. Ask for their assistance, and let them help you as they will. Trust them.”

 

“The Doctor wants to mind-fuck me!” Alison points out, even as she knows that they don’t. They said themselves that they wanted to enter her brain to heal her. They obviously weren’t thinking that their proposal would come across as a violation to her. “I’m not really trusting the Doctor at this point.”

 

“Most of all, remember this.” The picture skews and blurs as the Magister draws the tablet closer to his face. “Even though I am not there, you are still the same as you ever were,” he says, hunching over the screen and speaking down into it. Somehow he seems to be looking right at her. “You are bright and sharp and quick; you are brilliant and warm and full of light. And you are strong; you are capable. 

 

“Please don’t mistake me,” he continues. “I’m not telling you,  _ Oh, you must be strong for me.  _ I am not saying that you must stoically endure in my absence. Nor am I saying that you feel no worry or pain. I am only saying that you have more brilliance inside you than that for which you give yourself credit. Because of that brilliance and because of your friends’ care, you will survive your desolation. If you can’t trust yourself, at least trust me.” He pauses. “Trust me,” he repeats. “Trust your Magister. Will you?”

 

Alison inhales shakily, then exhales. “Yes.”

 

“Why do I even need to ask? I know that you will…because I know who you are, my dear.” The Magister holds her gaze. “Don’t you?”

 

Alison nods, even though she doesn’t feel like much of who she is right now. 

 

“Tell me who you are then,” he says softly.

 

“I’m...your… I’m your Domina.” The sentence dribbles out pathetically in a manner most unbecoming to someone who’s supposed to be the master of her fate and the captain of her soul.

 

“Yes, just so.” The Magister smiles at her. “Even if you don’t think that you are, even if your robot is off being repaired, you’re still my good Domina, and you will be until I return.” The video ends.

 

“You’d better come back,” Alison says under her breath, replacing the tablet on the shelf and going again to bed. With Imp stationed on her pillow to keep away vacuum cleaner nightmares, Alison drifts into a deep, hard sleep. 

 

She dreams of the Magister and the Doctor, not as they are currently, one absent and one guilt-ridden, but as they were in the memory that never happened to her. Sending herself back into that stormy cemetery, she turns fearlessly upon the would-be violators of her friend. She buries them alive as she wishes she could have done to the Shalka. They die quickly, and she never has to worry about them again. Her sleep is peaceful from then on.


	5. Alison Argues With the Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor explains why Alison ended up in hospital and how they were trying to help her. Alison tells the Doctor exactly why going into her brain without permission is a bad idea.

“No!” Alison wakes abruptly to Scintilla’s voice, like right outside her bedroom door. “You can’t come in here, and you can’t see her.”

 

“Can you at least tell me how she’s doing?” It’s the Doctor’s voice, pitched upward and plaintive. “She was stable enough yesterday for me to bring her out of the healing coma, but she didn’t let me do any further work, so she’s not completely finished, and I -- “

 

Alison rubs her eyes. Why do they have to scream right next to her bedroom? Sitting up slowly, she runs her fingers through her hair and discovers that she fell asleep so quickly and without her cap that her hair has gone flat on the right side. “Fuck,” she mutters, setting her feet on the plush carpet. She stands without spinning out of control. Nevertheless, she keeps her steps slow and measured as she advances toward the door.

 

“Well,” Scintilla admits, “she does tend to go dizzy and shut off rather suddenly.”

 

“I knew it; I knew it!” The Doctor, sounding agitated, is probably hopping from one foot to the other. “If I could just get her back in the Zero Room, I could look into her brain, see which sections were damaged, and probably reprogram most of them. I could fix -- “

 

Alison opens the door to her chambers. At the end of a short corridor, Scintilla’s clock door opens onto Anima’s interior. A person with a plastic blue bob stands inside Scintilla, preventing the Doctor from crossing into the Magister’s ship. “Oi, you two, Doctor and...blue person!” Alison calls. “Be quiet.”

 

The blue person turns around. “Miss Alison, you’re awake!” the person says in Scintilla’s voice. A huge smile crosses their pale pink plastic face. Their eyebrows, thick and black like the Magister’s, but painted on, rise. Alison feels like she’s looking at a life-size doll. Is this Scintilla?

 

“Alison!” The Doctor jumps, momentarily popping above the blue person’s head. “If you’d just let me -- “

 

“I’m not letting you do shit,” Alison informs them. “How dare you put me in a coma without my permission? How dare you stick me in hospital without my permission?”

 

“But… But...the psychic vampire…” 

 

“The what?”

 

“You’d just had your brain invaded! And then you fell like four meters and cracked your head.” The Doctor is still jumping, trying to see around the blue person, who shadows their movements, blocking them at every turn. “You had a concussion. You were unconscious anyway. You needed emergency care!” 

 

“Again? I got mind-fucked again?” Alison staggers a step and props herself against the wall.

 

“Miss Alison!” The blue person -- she’s definitely Scintilla somehow, though Alison thought that she was inside Scintilla -- rushes to Alison’s side. Cool, gentle hands, made of shiny plastic, with clearly visible ball joints, grasp her and support her. “I think you should sit down.” Swiveling her head back toward the exit, Scintilla glares at the Doctor and warns, “Don’t you dare come in.”

 

The Doctor, remaining in the doorway, hangs their arms and their head. They speak to Alison: “You don’t...remember any of that? I guess you don’t. Eh, maybe it’s just as well...” Their voice fades out for a few seconds. 

 

“You’re telling me that more aliens tried to... _ again?” _ Gooseflesh and sweat break out on Alison’s arms, her back, her scalp. She feels sticky, chilly, and, most of all, repulsive.

 

“Yes, yes.” The Doctor nods their head, not meeting her eyes. “That’s what the Finisterran vampire was trying to do to you, to me, to the Master. It had you in its grip, and then...it dropped you.”

 

Alison’s knees buckle, but Scintilla’s arm around her shoulder grants her some steadiness. “Well, that would explain why my head hurts…”

 

The Doctor raises their head, and they’re crying, the blue mascara running from their eyelashes. “It hurt you! It was going to kill you. I know I did things without your permission, but I couldn’t let you die.” 

 

“Oh,” says Alison in a small voice. “Then...it was going to mind-fuck me, or it was in the middle of mind-fucking me, and you… You stopped it.”

 

“I… That is, the Master… I used his… Well, we, um, killed it,” the Doctor says finally. “I had to save you; I had to help you. I’m the Doctor; that’s what I do! I’m never going to lose -- not again -- so dear… Don’t you understand?  _ Safe and whole and happy, _ Alison,” they say, the phrase that summarizes the requirements of Alison’s companion contract.  _ “Safe...and whole...and…” _ Hiccups interrupt them.

 

“You and my robot then… You stopped it. You saved my life.” Alison rubs her forehead. It’s not quite hurting yet, but it’s got a funny feeling, like it’s more present, more sensitive, and just about to start giving her pain. 

 

“Yeah… Yeah!” The Doctor nods hopefully.

 

“So… Um… Thank you then.” Alison tries nodding a little bit in return, but even that is too much. “You stuck me in hospital because that’s what you had to do to save me. I understand that, and I’m glad you did.  _ Safe and whole and happy _ \-- you were trying to keep me safe and whole and happy. And that’s good, and...thank you.” She shivers a little bit. “Thank y-you.”

 

The Doctor sniffles, but stands a little straighter. “Of course, Alison, of course.” They dab their eyes with the unbuttoned cuff of their shirt. “Oh, mascara stains…”

 

“But… But… But…” Alison shivers more; Scintilla holds her tighter. “Why did you want to go into my brain? Why the fuck did you say you could  _ fix me,  _ that I needed  _ more work, _ that you could  _ reprogram  _ me?”

 

“Well, because I can! I mean, I could!” The Doctor’s smiling now. “You have some brain damage from your concussion, but I should be able to go in -- “

 

“No!” yell Alison and Scintilla simultaneously. The Doctor springs backward from the force of their negative. 

 

“Nothing at all goes inside my head without my permission!” Alison’s skull throbs. “No Shalka, no psychic vampire, no Magister, no Doctor. You and him agreed to respect my limits, and one of those limits is you staying out of my head. It was in the contract that we all signed!” 

 

“I know. But your vertigo -- your headaches -- your exhaustion… I could -- “

 

“Fuck  _ no!” _ Alison makes fists, closes her eyes, and yells again. _ “Tace _ and just listen for once. I don’t care if you think you’re helping me or healing me. If you go inside my head without my permission for any reason whatsoever, that’s a violation. And, just in case you didn’t get it the first time,” she says, hitting each phrase with slow emphasis, “you don’t -- have my permission -- to go into -- my head.” 

 

“Violation! Oh…” The Doctor finally understands her. “Um…” Their mouth hangs open for a second. Then they close it and repeat their first word: “Oh… Um, Alison, oh no...I’m so sorry; I didn’t -- “

 

Alison has no patience for this right now. She puts her right hand on her hip and keeps rubbing her head with the left. “So...do  _ you  _ want to be the alien who fucking mind-rapes me for the third time?” she asks. “That wasn’t rhetorical! That was an actual question.”

 

“Alison, I’m so sorry. I understand; I see what you mean; I don’t want to hurt you; I’d never -- “

 

“Answer the question!” Alison snaps. “Would you like to be the alien who mind-fucks me for the third fucking time, Doctor?” 

 

The Doctor shakes their head as if they’ve just been asked if they want to be the next to die.

 

“Well, good.” Alison leans against Scintilla. Her hair’s squashed on one side, her eyes crusty, her sweat rank. She feels ugly, crumpled, and used. “Now where’s my… Where’s my robot? I want my robot. Why isn’t he here?”

 

The Doctor sighs, sounding as tired as Alison feels. “The Master… Your… He was, um, affected by the Finisterran vampire too. I have him in my lab because I have to...uh… It might be a while.”

 

“Oh…” So the Magister was right; he is indeed off being repaired for who knows how long. Without anyone to hold it fast, Alison’s heart pitches down a nauseating chute, landing at the bottom somewhere deep inside her. She’s so very tired, and she hasn’t the strength to pick it up. She lets Scintilla guide her back to bed.

  
  
  
  
  
  



	6. The Doctor Apologizes to Alison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor apologizes to Alison for assuming that she would let them into her head. The two of them mostly reconcile. The Doctor fells in the blanks about what happened with the psychic vampire thing, but they still won't tell her what happened to her robot.

Alison wakes up several hours later when she rolls over and collides with someone who’s not Imp. Shrieking, she’s about to dive out of the bed the other way. But it’s only Scintilla, who was evidently sitting millimeters from her on the bed and monitoring her during her nap.

 

Alison makes her way to the bathroom as Scintilla follows with running commentary on how much better Miss Alison seems to have slept and the salutary effect of Imp on upset people. The monologue continues as Alison uses the toilet, washes up a little bit, and gets dressed. 

 

She had kind of hoped that the Magister, a dandy and a designer, might have supplied some magic clothes for Miss Alison’s Secret Hideaway, but no. It’s just jeans and T-shirts mostly, with a few jumpers and hoodies, all on the bright end of the visible spectrum. She chooses magenta bellbottoms and a yellow tunic embroidered with cornflowers about the square neckline.

 

She leaves the bathroom to sit at on a tufted stool before a mustard yellow vanity. Tilting the mirror toward her, she sees pictures etched around its oval perimeter: a woman galloping on a horse, then plucking a double rose, then staring straight into the eyes of an eldritch-looking man. The woman stands in silhouette, obviously pregnant, then kneels to dig up a plant. The eldritch man stops her. The woman watches ranks of eerie people march by on their horses. She spies the eldritch man and pulls him down, then holds him as he transforms from one fearsome thing to another. The final picture shows a closeup of a young girl’s face, as bold as the woman’s, as fey as the man’s, with her parents smiling behind her. 

 

It’s the story of Tam Lin, saved from the fairies by Janet’s bravery. Cursive along the bottom of the mirror quotes the line from the story that Alison and the Magister use as a spell:  _ Hold me fast, and fear me not. _ “I wish you would,” Alison whispers. “I wish I could.”

 

Scintilla leans her elbows on the vanity tabletop, now approximately thirty centimeters from Alison. She details all the breakfast foods that she made this morning. Miss Alison fell asleep before Scintilla had a chance to serve her, but that she could certainly reheat any of it. There’s a short digression about fine motor control, still a challenge to Scintilla, though she has assumed this form many times since the Magister’s robotification. Scintilla then starts listing lunch menu options, with asides on the Magister’s preferences when he was biological.

 

Alison tries to coax her hair back into its symmetrical corona while ignoring her reflection. She fails. Eventually her hair resumes an acceptably spherical shape, but everything else just...droops. Her face, finely featured at best and pointy at worst, appears elongated and drawn. Dark smeary shadows collect beneath her eyes. Even her eyebrows, which usually take dramatic swoops with little angled hooks near the ends, hang low. Worst of all, there’s that yellow tinge of sickness rising in her skin, cooling the warm, slightly reddish brown of her complexion. She feels okay at the moment, well rested, not in any pain, but she sure looks like crap.

 

While eating a little breakfast [buckwheat pancakes with strawberry jam], Alison teaches Scintilla about the concept of personal space. Scintilla quickly grasps that, though the Magister has instructed her to watch over Miss Alison, she need not stay within a half meter at all times. At first she is quite embarrassed at  _ being an inappropriate human.  _ Her chagrin dissipates, though, when Alison says that she understands that Scintilla does not know all the unspoken social expectations that she does. However, she really likes Scintilla, so, if Scintilla is patient with her, they should get along well. Scintilla responds to this, as she does to just about everything else, with effusive ebullience.

 

Alison asks Scintilla about her new humanoid  _ [actually Time Dork, _ Scintilla corrects] shape. Scintilla explains that she can exist both as her ship self and this wirelessly controlled robotic form. While she cannot venture too far from her main ship self, she often uses her robotic shape inside her walls to keep the Magister company. Because the Magister is currently under repair and the Doctor is being  _ a complete and utter dolt _ [Alison figures that Scintilla picked this phrase up from the Magister], Scintilla brought out her robotic shape so that Miss Alison could see a friendly face. Alison thanks Scintilla, whose face turns even friendlier, her blueberry-colored lips stretched wide, her eyes closing into half moons. She still resembles a doll to Alison, not just because of her plastic, but because of her expressiveness. She’s a doll so beloved that she has become alive.

 

Scintilla reports that, while Miss Alison was sleeping this morning, the Doctor left her a message. Alison unfolds the paper. There’s a four-line verse in the center of the page. The Doctor writes with a fountain pen, a sure, supple touch, and many loops on the capitals...at least at the beginning of each line. By the end of each line, the words dwindle and crawl up the right margin. Several staffs, each filled with a thicket of notes, coil around the verse. Some of the notes bud, bloom, or sprout leaves. In short, this crowded sheet of A4 exemplifies how the Doctor’s associative, messily creative mind works.

 

_ Remorse is cureless -- the Disease _

_ Not even God -- can heal -- _

_ For ‘tis Their institution -- and _

_ The Adequate of Hell -- _

 

_ P.S. I’m in my jungle. _

 

All of yesterday’s terror has left Alison, as well as this morning’s cutting defensiveness. She pockets the paper. Assuring Scintilla that her conversation with the Doctor will be brief, she leaves the Magister’s ship.

 

Guided by Anima, Alison finds the Doctor’s jungle. This is her first time inside the conservatory complex, and she takes a moment to admire it. The long glass greenhouses glimmer in ranks before her. So many plants breathe within these buildings that condensation collects on the walls of their houses, transforming into interior rain. Anima’s directions send Alison down a gravel path to the Xenoequatorial Forest Zone, where the Doctor is working.

 

Alison enters the xenoforest, suddenly enrobed in a damp warmth that clings to her like soaked cotton. There’s so much green that she can taste it: sharp, sour, crisp, quick. There’s so much growth: lianas from the ceiling, moss in yellow and brown patchwork underfoot, branches closely knitted along the walls. She can hear the work of life: the buzz of various bugs, the patter of the irrigation system bestowing artificial rain upon the leaves. The flowers -- striped, piebald, spotted, even some with uncannily human faces in their petals -- shine so much that they really should be singing. Everything merges into an impressionistic marvel too stupendous to be comprehended by a single sense.

 

She realizes that she and the Magister are wrong if they think that the Doctor is detached from reality. This is reality, this incredible synaesthetic riot of life, information, and sensation. The Doctor lives it; it flows through them; they spread it with their very breath in a way that Alison and the Magister do not.

 

Alison now knows the reason for the Doctor’s difficulty with words. When you speak, first you organize the discrete units of words inside yourself. Then you propel them into the world with a carefully calibrated delivery. When you listen to someone else’s words, you have to take them all inside of yourself. You painstakingly replicate the arrangement that the speaker gave them. Then you examine them until they make sense. Either way, such effort requires an experience of reality as divisible into units that correspond to linguistic tags.

 

But life isn’t like that for the Doctor; instead, it’s all of a piece to them, and they are but a part. Words are inadequate to the wholeness of their experience. Besides, there’s too much going on, and it’s all so exciting! There’s no time to withdraw and line up words in a chain.

 

\--Unless, of course, they’re someone else’s. The Magister has said,  _ When the Doctor feels strongly, they often speak in the words of others -- usually Earthlings, for some reason. They favor William Shakespeare for love and strife, Emily Dickinson for intrapsychic conflict, and Victorian or Edwardian operettas for other cases. _

 

Alison has not experienced this tendency of the Doctor’s, however, until today. First there was their apology note. Because of the dashes and the idiosyncratic capitalization, she thinks it’s Dickinson. 

 

And now they’re quoting another poem. They sit an arbor, either intertwined with or constructed from smooth, dark red vines. Spiky leaves, as thick and succulent as aloe, nod over their head. They speak as if to someone buried beneath the narrow path at their feet:

 

_ “I know he is too dear for my possessing, _

_ And like enough he knows his estimate: _

_ The charter of his worth gives him releasing; _

_ My bonds in him are all determinate. _

_ For how do I hold him but by his granting? _

_ And for that riches where is my deserving?” _

 

“Doctor?” Alison approaches. “I got your note.” She holds it up. “And I know you wanted to talk, so...here I am.”

 

“Alison!” The Doctor hurries toward her. Even more disheveled than they were this morning, they still haven’t done anything with the blue mascara trails on their cheeks. Furthermore, now they have dirt ingrained all over their trousers. “Erm, do you mind if I borrow that back? I kind of worked out a troublesome bit of my libretto on there, and…”

 

“Yeah. No problem.” Alison returns the note. The hot, thick wind of the xenoforest folds about her. An odor, like citrus but more astringent, moves past, so strong that Alison nearly tastes it. The rub of leaves against leaves sounds somehow like the auditory equivalent of itching. Her head gets that weird sense of imminence again; a headache is gathering, but has yet to strike. “Do you think we could talk someplace else less, uh, noisy and smelly and colorful? Not that this place is gross -- it’s just a lot for me to handle right now.”

 

They go out to the gravel paths between greenhouses. Alison sucks in lungfuls of empty, scentless air, washing from her body the overwhelming presence of the jungle. It’s cooler here, with the rainbows of leaf and flower muted by misty glass. “Ahhh…” she breathes. “So much better.”

 

“I’m sorry about what I did yesterday,” says the Doctor, their voice as low as it can go without burying itself. “I thought that I would help you and make you all better.” They’re wringing their note to her like it’s a piece of laundry from which they must squeeze excess water. “I didn’t think of how going into your brain would make things worse for you. I didn’t think that it would have broken the contract, but I think I did. Broke the contract, I mean. Which was very, very, very...not good. And wrong. And I don’t want you to go home, but I want you to be safe and whole and happy, so...um… I’m very, very, very, very sorry, and I know why you have to go.” The tortured piece of paper comes apart in their grasp. They look at it as if too terrified to cry.

 

“But...Doctor...I don’t want to go home,” Alison says gently. 

 

“Oh?” The Doctor looks confused.

 

“I just want you never to do anything like that again.” 

 

“Oh! I can do that! I mean -- I’ll stop doing it. I’m able to stop doing it.” The Doctor nods quickly, eagerly, as they do whenever they’re promising.

 

“Besides, my robot’s here. I can’t leave without my robot. --Anyway, I don’t care if you need the Magister to snap at you, give you a cue, or consensually mind-fuck you into thinking about it. I don’t care if you have to physically make yourself stop in your tracks and say,  _ Okay, self, this thing that I’m about to do -- does it follow the terms of the contract?” _

 

The Doctor frowns in thought, their nod slowing. “Good idea. Jolly good! I should do that.”

 

“From now on, before you do anything, you ask yourself that question, and you make sure the answer is  _ yes _ before you do it.” Alison holds her finger up. “If you have even the slightest bit of doubt, ask me or the Magister or Anima or someone you trust. Do you understand?”

 

“Yes, yes, of course. If I do something wrong and you tell me to do it better, don’t worry; I never forget! I may not be much cop at focusing on what people expect me to focus on, but I remember everything!” The Doctor waves their arms around in a vaguely globular shape, as if encompassing the entire universe. “I’ll always remember what you told me, and I’ll always do it from now on. And you’re right -- if I don’t do it, the Master would always be glad to cue me. Well! I feel a little better now. How about you? How are you doing?”

 

“I’m okay. I haven’t felt too much pain since getting up for lunch, although there was a little bit of a headache in the background when we were in the xenoforest.” Alison grimaces. “But Scintilla’s great, so I’m going to stay with her a while ‘cause I, um, miss my robot.” She blinks hard, squeezing her eyes shut with a squint, several times. She is not going to cry. “When do you think he’ll be better? What the fuck actually happened back there? I know that the psychic vampire got me and tried to vacuum out my thoughts, then broke my brain by dropping me. But what was it doing to you and my robot?”

 

The Doctor fills some of the gaps in Alison’s memory. After Anima hung out in the Time Vortex for nearly a month, the High Council delivered the Doctor’s next assignment. They flew forty light-years from Earth -- and four thousand years into Alison’s future -- into the constellation Aquarius. There, humans colonized Trappist One G of the Trappist One star system. 

 

Renamed Finisterra, the planet contained only one island settlement of ten thousand people. Because the settlement’s island was eroding due to overuse, Finisterrans looked for places to relocate. Twelve expeditions to the agriculturally promising mainland, however, never returned, except for one person. They brought back a barely coherent tale of a dark, wet cave, something hungry and bodiless, and the experience of reliving memories of their dead comrades. 

 

The High Council, all but snickering, told the Doctor to dispatch the evil ghost that was obviously persecuting the superstitious Finisterrans. This was the Doctor’s chance to do something truly good, untainted by painful side effects. Then they might stop sulking about killing two thousand Shalka in order to save Earth.

 

When they landed on Finisterra, the Doctor discerned that the situation was deadly serious. There was no evil ghost, but in fact a psychic vampire, an incorporeal entity that the Doctor had never before encountered. It lured both the Doctor and Alison into its clutches, catching them in images from their own past. But the Doctor saw some stray memories from the vampire’s previous victims. Realizing that they were in a trap, the Doctor broke free and rescued Alison.

“Stray memories? But I got one from the Magister. Was it mind-fucking him too?”

 

“You experienced something from the Master’s mind?” The Doctor blanches. “What… What did you see?” 

 

“Nothing bad, just you and me -- him -- in the academy together.” She doesn’t want to talk to them about it. If anyone, she wants to speak to the Magister. It’s his memory...and hers too now in some way.

 

“Ah. Good. I’m glad. Anyway, I realized that it wasn’t feeding from you and me; it was looking for something that it couldn’t find. It needed cruelty and meanness, and it was just…” The Doctor shudders from head to toe. “--So sticky and smothery...and  _ wanting.” _

 

About to ask how something incorporeal can be so tangibly slimy, Alison recalls that the Doctor doesn’t really do separate senses. “So how did you make it fuck off?”

 

“Well, it was basically made of evil, so I, um, overwhelmed it with more. It was a sort of...bomb...made out of evil.”

 

“But...you’re making it sound like you just have -- I don’t know -- spare vats of evil lying around.” Alison raises her voice. “What aren’t you telling me?”

 

The Doctor regards her for several beats. Three times they take a breath to form words; three times they release it speechlessly, sighing. Then, eventually, they recite:

 

_ “My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- _

_ In Corners -- till a Day -- _

_ The Owner passed -- identified -- _

_ And carried Me away -- _

 

_ “Though I than He -- may longer live _

_ He longer must -- than I -- _

_ For I have but the power to kill, _

_ Without -- the power to die --” _

 

“Um,” says Alison after a silence. “More Dickinson?” When the Doctor bobs their head, Alison takes a step closer. “I got the verse you wrote me about remorse; that one was pretty obvious, but what does this one mean?”

 

“It means… It means what I feel.” The Doctor brings their hands up as if they might mold an interpretation from the air and present it to her. But there’s nothing in their grasp. Then they drop their arms as well as their chin. “I’m telling you what I can, but...I’m out of words. If the Master were here, he could translate, but… I just… I’m sorry.”

 

Just as the Magister told Alison that the Doctor quoted others to express their most passionate feelings, so he also mentioned that the Doctor often reached the limits of their language. In such cases, he advised Alison to recognize the Doctor’s inability and come to him for elucidation. “I’m sorry too,” says Alison.


	7. Alison Finds Her Robot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison finds her robot. She tells him a story, but it doesn't work.

“So…” The next day, Alison stops in front of a door. Made of cast iron, embedded in Anima’s wall like a hatch, it looks like the portal to an airlock or maybe a safe. It even has one of those spoked wheels that you have to turn to open it. “This is the door to the Doctor’s robotics lab.”

 

Anima chimes affirmatively, since she prefers not to speak like Scintilla.

 

“And the Doctor’s not in there.”

 

Another _yes_ chime.

 

“And they don’t know I’m here.”

 

Again a _yes._

 

Imp, who insisted on chaperoning her, perches lightly on the door knob wheel thing. She chirps affirmatively, then meows as she orbits Alison’s head: “Now! Now! Now!”

 

“Hang -- mmph -- on! This thing is heavy.” Putting her shoulders into the motion, Alison shoves the wheel anti-clockwise. It loosens with a grating of metal on metal.

 

The door swings inward with a low, drawn-out creak straight from a haunted house. It hovers ajar, and a message shimmers to the surface of the metal. It’s a neat, typeset version of the Doctor’s rambling copperplate, glowing as if illuminated: _Hoc opus, hic labor est._

 

For a moment, Alison looks at the Latin and wonders if she isn’t on the threshold of the Magister’s lab. Then she reminds herself that Virgil’s _Aeneid,_ whence this quote, is in fact epic poetry, thus suitable fare for the Doctor. The line comes from a speech given by the Cumaean Sibyl, previewing the challenges that Aeneas will face in the underworld. It’s easy to get in, but, as for getting out, she says, _here’s the work of it; here’s the travail._

 

It’s a fair assessment of the Doctor’s life actually: an almost inevitable slide into complicated predicaments from which they extricate themselves and their friends with hard work and flashes of cleverness. They must think of it as a hopeful testament to labor, ingenuity, and compassion saving the day. For Alison, though, the line adumbrates...well...nasty shit up ahead.

 

Nevertheless, Alison goes in, Imp darting before her. Lights snap on automatically over her head, revealing a room that reminds her of the Doctor’s jungle. Down from the tops of white cabinets spill ropey lianas, side by side with wires insulated in a rainbow of colors of plastic. Under a bank of full-spectrum lights, miniature citrus trees stand in planters next to skinless hands, the metal branches of their fingers bearing no fruit of their own. Trunks of both kinds line the walls. The rough, lichen-speckled ones of trees blend in with the grey or brown casings of automatons, some of them patterned with rust. The smell of grease and engine oil mixes with the damp green smell of plants, but Alison does not feel overwhelmed. This is yet another crucible of life both organic and artificial, but it’s quieter here. Instead of hurting, Alison’s thoughts calm and clarify.

 

As she enters more deeply, Alison puts her foot down with a juicy crunch. Glancing at her shoes, she finds succulent grass pushing up between the black floor tiles. Now that she has tromped on them, the blades lie flat, mimicking the discarded fiber optic cables nearby.

 

Just to reorient herself, Alison cranes her neck in the other direction. She stares up into a mirrored ceiling. Now the cyborganic garden seems doubly large and doubly strange. Returning her attention to the actual, unreflected world, she calls out: “Hey, Imp, do you see the Magister?”

 

Imp zooms out of the shadows at the back of the room, trilling. “[I found him! This way!]” Alison follows as quickly as she dares on the uneven tiles.

 

She finds her robot literally up in the air. There’s nothing wrong with him that she can see; he’s all in one piece, his clothes and his magnetic faceplate undisturbed. He’s in his default disempowered position, eyes closed, head bowed, hands clasped loosely before him. But he’s not sitting, as he usually is when the Doctor turns him off. Instead he’s hanging maybe a half a meter off the floor, held by a harness around his core that looks like it came from a fetish club. The harness connects to a crane arm on a ceiling track. Alison thinks of the lift that her gram used in hospital to get from bed to toilet [before the hospital killed her].

 

“Goddammit, Doctor!” About to yell at the ceiling, Alison remembers that the reflective tiles nearly made her dizzy. Turning her back on the Magister so she’s not berating him, she aims her fury at the Doctor’s lab door. She doesn’t want to launch a tirade at the Doctor themselves, mistrusting them as she currently does. But she needs to yell at something, so their lab will serve.

 

“Do you see what you did to my robot?” cries Alison. “That is not how you hold someone fast at all. First, you never, ever leave your sub in suspension while they’re unsupervised. Your Master of Kinky Shit must have told you that! Second of all, you never, ever do whatever the fuck this is to a disabled person. You’re a freakin’ medical doctor. You must have learned this in your training. And people wonder why I have nightmares about the medical industrial complex. It’s because even the best doctors pull asinine stuff like this!” She waves her hand behind her.

 

Going back to the Magister, Alison finds Imp flying around and around him. Unperturbed that he’s off, Imp starts at his feet and rubs her face on every square centimeter of him. By the time she rests on his shoulders, she has spread cat hair evenly across his suit. “[There! I don’t care if he’s off,]” Imp declares. “[Now he’s mine again, and, when he wakes up, he’ll know exactly who he belongs to.]”

 

Alison chuckles, shaking her head. “See, Doctor? That’s a much better way to hold someone fast. You head-butt them all over and then sit on them.”

 

She identifies a manual wheelchair in the corner. Retrieving it, she positions it under the Magister, then finds the lift controls on a wall panel. She lowers him into the chair, unclips the harness from the lift, puts his feet on the footrests, and then, after a moment’s thought, does the chair’s seat belt over his lap.

 

“I mean -- c’mon!” she continues to the absent Doctor, as she pushes a tripod stool next to the Magister’s chair. She sits. “I myself don’t have much experience helping people. I just watched my mum with my gram a lot, then did it a few times on my own. But even I know that this is better than just leaving someone hanging. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but at least I know how to treat my robot!” she adds, sending her words toward the door. “And if you don’t, Doctor, then you need your Master to teach you something before you deserve to have a robot again!”

 

She sighs, then folds at the waist so that she can look into the Magister’s face. He’s so very motionless, but not with the taut, distorted rictus of death that she saw in her gram’s open casket. Instead he’s like a statue, carved to illustrate a deep, peaceful sleep. He might awake at any minute, all the lines of his face opening and leaping into action.

 

“Robot of mine,” Alison says in a whisper. “Your face…” She traces his profile, from the many furrows on his forehead, along the angle of that sharp, curving-down nose, then across one of his long and sagging cheeks. “--Flickers like fire, always changing. And your fucking ridiculous eyebrows.” She moves her finger along one of them. “I don’t even know what to compare them to. It’s like they have minds of their own.

 

“Speaking of fucking ridiculous,” she says with a smile, “you and your beard. The little white stripes in the bottom outer corners are great, although I think they might be dyed, but this pointy bit at the end…” She runs her thumb and her forefinger around the outline of his goatee, bringing them together at the center of his chin. “This is just like the stereotypical icing on the _TV villain_ cake...or something. You are such a Time Dork.

 

“Your mouth,” she says, “and all your smirks that make an indentation in your cheek right there.” She touches the wrinkle around his lips that looks like a parenthesis. “You always have something to say, and you think you’re so clever, and you’re like constitutionally incapable of shutting up.” She puts her finger against his lips. _“Tace, mi Magistre!_

 

“Fuck…” She slips her hand along his arm so that it’s curled in his, then squeezes his hand, bringing it closer to her face. She rubs her cheek against his glove. “I...didn’t mean that. I mean -- I did, but not like _Oi, shut up._ Just like… _Hey, remember who you are?_ I think...if I did that...then I could bring the sparks back to your eyes. I mean…”

 

Alison leans her head against his shoulder, gets some cat hair in her mouth, and spits it out. “I know you can’t talk back to me, but I still want to talk to you, so...I’ll tell you a story, like you told me when I was scared after the Shalka. Maybe somehow it will get through to you and calm you down. I doubt it will ‘cause you’re off and everything, but, at the very least, it might calm _me_ down. Just bear with my silly ideas, okay? Here we go.

 

“Once there was a Ruler of Time who lived in a flying Labyrinth. They traveled across all the stars, healing people and places and worlds, and all those who met the Ruler loved them.

 

“But the Ruler of Time had a secret. They kept the person they loved, the Unmaker, in their Labyrinth. The Ruler loved the Unmaker because he was the only other one who understood joys and sorrows on a cosmic scale. And the Ruler hated the Unmaker because he broke things, people and places and worlds, and the Ruler did not want to admit that they too sometimes broke the universe instead of healing it. Ashamed because of their similarity to the Unmaker, the Ruler imprisoned the Unmaker in their Labyrinth, where he had all of his power to kill, but never the power to die.

 

“The Ruler of Time met a person who, just like them, wanted desperately to heal the universe. The Ruler promised to teach the person to be a doctor to the sicknesses of the cosmos. So the person boarded the Ruler of Time’s magical castle as a Healer in Training.

 

“However, the Ruler of Time could not mend everything in the universe. Thus they and the Healer in Training encountered the jagged, harmful edges of people and places and worlds. The Healer fell on the sharp, hungry parts of the universe and broke once and then twice. The Healer thought that she was strong already because of everything that she had endured on Earth, but she wasn’t.

 

“The broken person went to the center of the Labyrinth. ‘You are the Master of breaking people,’ she said to the Unmaker.

 

“‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have broken many people, and I have been broken myself.’

 

“‘And yet,’ said the broken person, ‘you have remade yourself. Will you remake me? I would be the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.’

 

“‘I will help you, but you must help me in return,’ the Unmaker said. ‘I would be free of this Labyrinth so that I could have my own will once more. Then the Ruler of Time and I could love each other without hatred.’

 

“‘What would you do if you were free?’ asked the broken person. ‘Would you unmake people and places and worlds again?’ The Unmaker couldn’t say, for he didn’t know the answer. ‘Then tell me this,’ said the broken person. ‘Will you keep me safe and whole and happy?’

 

“‘I will.’

 

“‘I trust you then. I know that you want me, but not like you want the Ruler of Time. You want someone who knows you without fear, who listens to and learns from you, and who will do everything they can to secure your freedom. You want what I have, and I want what you have, so you and I – we’re going to be good to one another.’

 

“‘We will,’ answered the Unmaker. ‘But, while I may benefit you and be good for you, don’t make the mistake of thinking that I will be good.’

 

“‘I’m sick of fighting the good fight,’ said the broken person. ‘I want to be sharp. I want to hurt people who would hurt me. I want to be powerful.’

 

“‘Now that,’ said the Remaker, ‘is good.’”

 

Alison closes her eyes. “Oh, robot of mine...I’ve known you for less than two months, and you’ve been off for like six days of that.” She laughs at her own silliness, picking more cat hair off her tongue. “It’s been such a short time since you’ve been gone. I’m such a complete and utter dolt. I’m desperate and foolish and hopelessly naive, but...I miss you so much. What’s wrong with me? Why am I so…?” She sniffs. Tears are seeping toward her eyes; with them rises the tickly feeling of upcoming pain in her head. “Fuck off, tears,” she says. “Fuck off!”

 

She laces her fingers in between his, pretending that she can feel the pressure of his hand in return. “You told me after the Shalka, _Hold me fast, and fear me not._ So...I let you touch me; I let you hold me because I wasn’t afraid of you, and then I felt safe.” That was a soft and cozy time; even though her head hurt, she was in her room, surrounded by familiarity. At first, his touch was foreign, so she rejected it, even as she knew he was helping her. But then he touched her differently, very gently. She realized, from the expectant golden sparks in his eyes, how much he wanted her to be his good Domina. So she was still, and she was good, and she was safe.

 

“Now here I am, holding you fast and fearing you not, but it’s no use.” She tries to bring back that warm certainty, but this is a cool, foreign room of sharp angles, stark shades, and raw machinery. Her disempowered robot has his eyes closed. Even if she was good, he wouldn’t see her. He can’t touch her and make her what she should be. “I’m so scared and so unsafe. I wish that you could be the one holding me.”


	8. Alison and Scintilla Analyze Poetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison and Scintilla use the poetry that the Doctor gave them in an attempt to figure out what happened to Alison's robot.

Though she has seen the Magister dead in the Doctor’s robotic underworld, though she tried to bring him back with her story and failed, Alison sleeps tranquilly. Resorting again to the Magister’s memory of defending the Doctor, she concentrates this time not on the dealing of death, but the saving of life. She imagines herself into that dank mausoleum once more. She holds her dear friend to her, and she calls them back from the brink of death with the voice and the power of her attachment. What didn’t work in real life now works in her mind, and her grief subsides enough to give her a refreshing night.

 

The next day, Alison tells Scintilla that she found her robot and gives Scintilla all the details in case she wants to see him herself. Then she and Scintilla agree to avoid the Doctor at the moment. For one thing, the terror that Alison felt upon waking up in hospital, on the verge of having her mind penetrated again, remains. She’s addressed the Doctor’s near violation of her companion contract, and she feels confident that the Doctor has learned to respect her limits from now on. And yet...however good the Doctor’s intentions are, however scrupulously obedient they will be in the future, she still feels safer in Miss Alison’s Hideaway with Scintilla.

 

For another thing, Alison and Scintilla don’t know what has happened to the Magister, but they do know that the Doctor won’t give them any information. They stammered and evaded Alison’s direct questions, then, upon interrogation, ran out of words. Alison and Scintilla must use their own wits if they’re going to make any progress.

 

Answers, they believe, lie in what little the Doctor explicitly stated to Alison, as well as the poetry that the Doctor gave Alison the day after she fled from them. “All right then,” says Alison. “We have to be logical and systematic about this.” She and Scintilla are in Miss Alison’s Hideway, sitting on the fairy tale bed that’s grand enough to sail away on.

 

“Let’s do a proof like in geometry. I’m the master of geometry, especially chronogeometry and hypergeometry. I mean -- you really need to have a basic understanding of it if you’re a TARDIS, but I’m actually a geometrical genius. Most TARDISes do enough chrono- and hyper- to get their owners where they need to go, and we even have competitions for certain routes, like the most efficient, the most fractal, the most elegant, that sort of thing. Sometimes I judge those competitions, but I’ve never really entered them because I’m in a different league. See -- I figured out how to integrate chrono- and hyper- with psychic!” The mattress springs creak as Scintilla sit-bounces.

  
Alison holds onto the nearest post to keep from falling over. “Wait -- what’s psychic geometry?”

 

Scintilla dives right into one of her exhaustive explanations. “Oh, it’s the basis of TARDISes’ relationships with their owners, obviously. Most of us keep the chrono- and hyper- separate from the psychic, but they really should be integrated, I think. We’re sentient machines. Our owners want us to think and have critical intelligence and come up with ideas that they don’t and tell them what to do! Okay, maybe they don’t want us to tell them what to do like coming right out and saying it, so we have to be sneakier about it and make them think it was like their own idea. But they definitely want us to tell them what to do, or otherwise they wouldn’t have made us able to, right? So we should integrate the psychic with the other types because then we’ll have a better idea of how to tell our owners what to do.” Alison, snickering and shaking her head slightly, wonders how much of Scintilla’s commanding and utterly self-satisfied temperament comes from her own tendencies and how much comes from working with the Magister, her match in that area.

 

“But anyway, for some reason, most TARDISes think that their owners are supposed to tell them what to do,” Scintilla goes on. “But that’s wrong and boring and silly, so I figured out the best way to tell my Master what to do. I calculate the chrono- and hypergeometry first, and I make sure that’s all correct. 

 

“Then I look into his psychic geometry and see what proofs he’s trying to develop. I compare my chrono- and hyper- results to the results that he wants to get with his psychic, and then I ask myself, _Do I want to help him get these results? Do I want to fuck with his head and send him in another direction?_ _Or do I want to do a little bit of both?_ Once I decide that, it’s a simple matter of working the psychic into the chrono- and hyper- and plotting a route for him. 

 

“Like I said, I’m very clever at it; in fact, I’m the master among TARDISes.” Scintilla’s pale green eyes glow brighter with pride. “I do it so good that the Master has never discovered that I’m sending him where  _ I _ want him to go, instead of where he thinks he should go. Plus I sent him to the Doctor,  _ and _ I sent him to you, so he has no right to complain, none at all!” She bounces especially hard for emphatic punctuation.

 

Sitting on the bed along with Scintilla is kind of like participating in a rodeo. Alison keeps a grip on the bed post to maintain her seat. “What do you mean -- you sent him to me?”

 

“Well, of course I did!” Scintilla spreads her arms wide, as if stating a fact of which everyone should already be aware. “You see -- you came onboard, and the Master was all excited. He told me about how you looked him in the eyes and refused to call him by his name and generally saw who he actually was while not taking any of his bullshit. But of course he was scared of you because he doesn’t have any idea what’s good for him, and so -- “

 

“The Magister was scared of me? Why? And can you please stop jumping so hard? It’s making me a little dizzy.”

 

“Oh! So sorry, Miss Alison.” Scintilla fixes her rear end firmly on the bed, but soon begins to wiggle as she starts up again with her story. “Don’t you see? The Master was scared of you because you weren’t scared of him, obviously. He’s gone his entire life thinking that he’s the Master because he makes people afraid of him. Because you weren’t scared of him, he didn’t have power over you. Because he didn’t have power over you, he thought that he had lost all his power.”

 

“Of course.” Alison nods sagely, glad that the world has stopped rocking from Scintilla’s exuberance. “We control freaks cling desperately to our illusion of control, but it’s very tenuous. Even the smallest inkling that someone isn’t in our power can have a huge effect. We’re like,  _ Oh shit, it’s the end of reality as we know it!” _

 

Scintilla shakes her head, having heard such a sentiment many times before. “You’re just like the Master. But obviously there are bunches of ways to have power over people besides scaring the shit out of them. I saw how the Doctor belonged to him not because of fear, but because of love, and that was how I got the idea to give the Master to you. It was obvious that you should belong to each other. So I just did the appropriate psychic geometry and, that night when you were alone in the Doctor’s library and really upset ‘cause you didn’t feel like the master of your fate, I piloted him to you! And the rest is history! Well, the rest is geometry, really, but you know what I mean.”

 

Alison would object if her robot ever told her that she belonged to him, but somehow it’s okay when Scintilla says it. Scintilla, who understandably has a transactional and possessive concept of relationships like her owner, uses the term  _ belonging _ without any baggage of objectification. For her, it’s a word that describes how two people should be together when they are good for each other and when they like each other. They belong to each other, and they belong together. At the beginning of her trip, Alison thought of her robot and the Doctor as pepper and salt, a matched set whose members should naturally accompany one another. Scintilla’s idea of belonging puts Alison and the Magister together in the same way.

 

Now that Scintilla has completed her informative [but digressive] disquisition, she and Alison approach their original subject -- what happened to the Magister on Finisterra -- like a geometrical proof. Alison lists the givens:

 

_ Given: There was a psychic vampire on Finisterra. _

 

_ Given: It fed on evil. _

 

_ Given: The Doctor and the Magister killed it by bombing it with so much evil that it was overwhelmed and killed. _

 

Scintilla copies Alison’s statements into a notebook verbatim, as if she is unsure what information is going to be on the final test, so she had better catch all of it. Looking at Scintilla’s hand -- dense, hooked, and vaguely Gothic -- Alison asks why she’s recording. Scintilla explains that she’s practicing her fine motor skills. Also she thinks in words -- doesn’t Miss Alison? -- and writing things down helps her remember them.

 

Now that Alison and Scintilla have determined their premises, they turn to the greater challenge of analyzing their evidence. They reread the poetic fragments that they have gleaned from the Doctor. They have the bit by Dickinson:

 

_ Remorse is cureless -- the Disease _

_ Not even God -- can heal -- _

_ For ‘tis Their institution -- and _

_ The Adequate of Hell -- _

 

They also have something else, which Alison is pretty sure is from Shakespeare:

 

_ I know he is too dear for my possessing, _

_ And like enough he knows his estimate: _

_ The charter of his worth gives him releasing; _

_ My bonds in him are all determinate. _

_ For how do I hold him but by his granting? _

_ And for that riches where is my deserving? _

 

And then there’s another thing about guns that’s definitely by Dickinson:

 

_ My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- _

_ In Corners -- till a Day -- _

_ The Owner passed -- identified -- _

_ And carried Me away -- _

 

_ Though I than He -- may longer live _

_ He longer must -- than I -- _

_ For I have but the power to kill, _

_ Without -- the power to die -- _

 

Scintilla writes all of these down, one to a sheet of paper. They spread them out on the bed and stare at them. After a minute, Scintilla volunteers that she can help with some of the interpretation. Even though the passages have poetic devices in them, they still have direct, concrete, descriptive language in them. She may not be good at  _ all the subtexts and supertexts and side texts that you humans build into your words, _ but she can certainly summarize the obvious. She writes abbreviated titles for the poems and her paraphrases:

 

_ Remorse: I feel incurable remorse on a cosmic scale. God created it, but it feels as bad as if I’m in Hell.   _

 

_ Too Dear for My Possessing: I only possess him because he gave me permission to do so. He’s too good for me; I don’t deserve to have him. Because he knows that, he will withdraw his permission and leave me. _

 

_ Loaded Gun: I was an unused weapon until my owner found me. He will outlive me because he can both kill and die. But I can only kill; I can’t die. _

 

Scintilla turns the synthesis of all these pieces over to Alison. “Right then.” Alison thinks aloud. “So the Doctor is the Magister’s weapon.” She picks up the  _ Loaded Gun _ synthesis. “The Magister’s going to outlive the Doctor because he’s non-biological; he’s a robot. But the Doctor can’t die because they’re a Time Dork; they keep regenerating. So the Doctor feels like they have to keep killing and killing, being the Magister’s gun.

 

“Anyway, the Magister used the Doctor as his gun when they were getting rid of the Finisterran vampire. He made an evil bomb and used the Doctor to pitch it at the vampire. The vampire died.

 

“But the Doctor doesn’t want to be the Magister’s gun. It makes them feel ashamed. They want to be good and kind and compassionate, but they don't feel that way when they kill things with evil bombs. They feel tortured by remorse and, even more than that, unworthy to be the Magister’s inevitable spouse. I’m getting that from  _ Remorse  _ and  _ Too Dear for My Possessing,” _ Alison adds, waving the sheets summarizing those poems. The she puts them back down on the duvet.

 

“Hmmm.” Scintilla contemplates the three sheets of fragments and the three sheets of summary. Then she puts the sheet of givens at the top of the two rows. “Hmmm,” she says again.

 

“Hmmm,” echoes Alison. She watches the seven pieces of paper, mentally encouraging their contents to reveal the truth of what happened to her robot. The papers remain uncommunicative.

 

“Uh, Miss Alison?” Scintilla says at last. “I don’t mean to offend you or to imply that you’re illogical or, even worse, unsystematic, but I don’t think our proofs are telling us anything new. What I mean to say is that we already know what you just said.”

 

“Ugh. I know.” Alison leans her forehead against a bed post. “We must have done something wrong. But what?”

 

“Well, we’re sure of all our givens because the Doctor stated those straightforwardly and clearly. Our mistakes must lie in our analyses of the poetry they gave us.” 

 

“Shit, you’re right.” Alison collects the papers into a stack and puts them on her night stand, then falls back on the bed. Her brain feels like a block of wood: still and dull.

 

Scintilla copies her, though landing with more force and an inevitable bounce. “I really don’t understand why humans think that subtexts and supertexts are so much fun. I suppose they can be fun to play with, but I don’t always want to play with language. I just want to figure out what the Doctor is saying! But the Doctor’s words are always so slippery. Just when I think that they mean something, they slide out of position and slink over to mean something else. I know that’s the way that they think, and it’s not bad, and it’s not wrong, but it’s just so...frustrating, you know? At least the Master’s words stay where he puts them.”

 

“I’m getting a headache, so I’m going to take a nap.” Rolling over, Alison tucks one arm under her pillow and the other arm over, nestling her neck in the soft support. “Maybe tomorrow my brain will be clearer, and we’ll have some new ideas.”

  
  



	9. Alison Figures It Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison realizes that her and Scintilla's poetic interpretations were wrong. In a flash of intuition, she figures out what has happened to her robot and how to restore him.

“I went to see my Master again while you were sleeping,” Scintilla confesses, her voice low and slow.

 

“Hgggmmm?” says Alison, mouth full of a peanut butter and hazelnut spread sandwich. She rested for an entire day after the mental exertion of poetry analysis. Now it’s a day and a half later, and she’s eating lunch after a three-hour nap that just _had to_ occur between 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM.

 

She sits at a corner booth table, which, for no apparent reason, is the elongated hexagon of a stereotypical coffin lid; in fact, it might actually be a coffin lid. That would explain the silver skull with wings embossed in the center. The walls are paneled in something that looks like wood, but contains the almost aubergine colors of certain weird heirloom carrots. The silver wall sconces for the electrical lights repeat the death’s head motif on the coffin top.

 

Alison swallows her mouthful. “Wait a minute, Scintilla. I thought that you couldn’t go very far from your ship self if you’re using your robot shape. How did you get to the Doctor’s robotics lab?”

 

“Oh. Well, I just materialized my ship self in the lab, then went scouting out in my robot form. So,” says Scintilla, sliding into the booth seat perpendicular to Alison and looking at the skull on the coffin top, “I found him all strapped in. I figured that he might be in the chair for a reason, so I didn’t want to move him. But I tried to connect psychically with him.

 

“It was very strange, though, Miss Alison.” Scintilla glances up at Alison. “I could connect partially with him, but he didn’t seem to recognize or notice me. It was sort of like he was dreaming, which is strange because, ever since his robotification, he hasn’t slept or dreamt.

 

“But I could still look in and see his thoughts, even if he wouldn’t respond to mine. He was thinking about mazes. He was thinking that the Doctor had trapped him in the center of a maze. So he was dreaming of himself, you know, as he sees himself, that decaying puppet, hanging there in the air by his strings. I understand the bit about the strings, especially since, like you said, he was strung up before you got to him, but I’m not sure where the maze came from. That’s not one of his usual mental images.” As the radiance of Scintilla’s eyes increases when she’s excited, so it dims when she reflects, and now their light sinks to the concentrated brightness of banked coals.

 

Alison speaks up. “Well, I didn’t mention this, but, when I went to see him, I told him a story about the Ruler of Time who had imprisoned the Unmaker in the Labyrinth, and then a broken person bargain with the Unmaker and got him free. I don’t know why I did. Pffft!” She scoffs at herself. “Silly wish fulfillment, I suppose. Maybe, though, he heard me...or at least enough for it to influence his dreams.”

 

“And maybe he is trapped: not just physically, like he was when you first saw him, but mentally too, like the Doctor put him in another state of consciousness. But why? Why would the Doctor do that to my Master?” Scintilla’s voice rises; her eyes flare up with distress.

 

Alison puts a few disparate thoughts together at that moment. First, she remembers the memory of her robot’s of him and the Doctor at the academy. The Doctor tortured him [because apparently the Doctor has a bondage kink], but also watched him so he didn’t die.

 

Second, she remembers her robot’s video message. He referred to the Doctor shutting off his mobility, but neglecting to shutting off his consciousness.

 

Finally, she remembers her fairy tale and the reason for the Ruler of Time’s imprisonment of the Unmaker in their Labyrinth: _The Ruler did not want to admit that they too sometimes broke the universe instead of healing it. Ashamed because of their similarity to the Unmaker, the Ruler imprisoned the Unmaker in their Labyrinth, where he had all of his power to kill, but never the power to die._

 

“Scintilla, Scintilla!” Alison stands, hands braced on the coffin top, boinging a bit on the balls of her feet. “I think I’ve figured it out. We’ve been looking at this all wrong. In the fairy tale I was telling him, I said that the Unmaker -- you know, my robot -- was the one with the _power to kill, but never the power to die._ So what if… What if it’s not the Doctor who’s the gun, but the Magister? And what if the Doctor is keeping him in their lab because _they_ did something evil with him, and they’re ashamed of what they did?”

 

“The Master? The Master is the gun?” Scintilla thinks, tapping her plastic finger on her plastic chin with a _click click click._ “You know, Miss Alison -- I think you’re right. I remember the Master saying to me once, back when he and the Doctor first got together, that he felt like _the Doctor’s weapon that they fired at people for whose harm they did not wish to claim direct responsibility.”_

 

“Yes, yes!” Though not happy about determining that the Doctor has been making a cannon of her robot, Alison nevertheless feels mounting excitement. Finally! She and Scintilla are getting somewhere. “Wait a minute, though... So, if he’s the gun, then what’s the evil thing that the Doctor did with him? Killing the Finisterran vampire wasn’t evil; it was self-defense...and me-defense. I mean -- they were trying to save me from it. That was an act of _good.”_

 

“But, remember, Miss Alison -- the Doctor killed the vampire by bombing it with evil, meaning that they collected a whole bunch of evil from somewhere and shot it at the vampire until it died.” Scintilla flings her hands to her face. “Oh! My poor Master, my poor, poor Master! How could they do that to you?”

 

“Do what?”

 

“Don’t you see? They took… Oh! Oh no… They took the evil from him, from my Master.”

 

“But that makes no sense. You can’t just do an evil draw like you do a blood draw. Evil’s not like blood or an organ or a body part that can be easily removed. It’s a description for a combination of temperament, actions, personality, thoughts, emotions, disposition, et cetera. The Doctor couldn’t have made a bomb out of evil unless they -- I don’t know -- wadded up my robot’s thoughts and memories and… Oh shit,” says Alison as the epiphany hits her. “Oh fuck. Oh shit. That’s exactly what they did.”

 

Alison drops herself back into the booth seat. “The Doctor… They made a bomb out of him. They took his thoughts, his memories, his emotions, everything that makes him who he is, and fired it at the vampire. And that’s why I experienced one of his memories: because it was being shot in my direction -- at the vampire, I mean -- along with everything else that he was. No wonder he’s not here. No wonder he couldn’t come for me. The Doctor hid him because they realized too late what they’d done. Oh God, Scintilla! The Doctor mind-fucked my robot. _My_ robot!” Alison cries in fury, stabbing a finger at her chest. “My robot…” Her voice drops. “He must have felt so confused, so powerless, so...violated. And couldn’t help him. I couldn’t keep him safe. Oh...I couldn’t help him.”

 

“Miss Alison, please don’t cry.”

 

“I’m...not crying. I don’t cry.”

 

“You couldn’t help him because you were being attacked. Please don’t feel guilty, Miss Alison. The Master won’t be angry at you. If anything, he’s probably going to be very upset with himself because he hasn’t been able to protect you.”

 

“I don’t feel guilty so much as I feel...just...sad because he was all alone with no one to help him.”

 

“Yeah. I wish we could go something to help him.”

 

“We can. We’re going to turn him back on.”

 

Scintilla balks. How will they do that? They’ll just borrow the Doctor’s remote control, Alison says. Scintilla isn’t sure how that’s possible. That’s the one thing that the Doctor never loses; they keep it with them at all times. And sneaking up on a Time Dork, even one as occasionally inattentive as the Doctor, is nearly impossible. She surmises that they would only obtain the Doctor’s remote control from them if the Doctor, having been asked, surrendered it voluntarily. As Alison does not wish to talk to the Doctor right now, that idea is out of the question.

 

Alison refuses to believe that the Magister has only a single remote control. This is the person with duplicates -- sometimes triplicates -- of every kitchen utensil he owns, at least one back-up of each of his sculpting tools and paints, and innumerable all-black _robot butler_ uniforms. He would never let there be but a single version of a device that held his entire life in the user’s palm. Such a thing would be too precious and too powerful to risk to uniqueness. He must have back-up remotes, but where?

 

Scintilla confesses that Alison is right. The Magister has spare remote controls hidden all over his ship, as well as a master controller that overrides all of the spares. He forbids Scintilla to use what Alison thinks of as the _master Master controller,_ so she never wants to touch it, but she does know where it is. Alison doesn’t want to touch something either that can basically turn on and off someone’s life, but this is an emergency. Under Scintilla’s guidance, she finds it, and both of them head to the Doctor’s lab.

 


	10. The Magister Is Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison and Scintilla turn the Magister's power back on. Happy reunion!

“Ready?” Alison looks to Scintilla.

 

“Ready, Miss Alison!” Scintilla says with a nod.

 

Together Alison and Scintilla press the buttons on the master Master controller, triggering a hard reset on the Magister. Alison rises to her toes almost instinctively, leaning forward.

 

At first, nothing happens. The Magister still sits in his wheelchair as they last left him, elbows on the armrests, feet on the foot plate, neck bent, eyes closed, appearing to have just nodded off. Scintilla, though, has an open psychic connection. “The Master’s fully disempowered -- off -- now,” she whispers to Alison. “Just a moment, and he’ll restart.

 

“C’mon, Master -- please boot up!” Scintilla squats by his chair, both hands tight on one of his armrests. “Please be all right!” she says, as if she can talk him back into functioning. “I don’t like when you’re gone; I don’t like when I can’t find you; I don’t like when I can’t see you or talk to you or think to you. You need to be here; you need to be with me; you need to be mine because...well...you are mine. Even though you’re silly and dorky and hammy and cheesy and Miss Alison says maybe slightly bananas and definitely uptight and control freaky and kind of a killjoy and really pretentious and pedantic, not to mention evil and bad-tempered and sadistic and frankly kind of creepy some of the time...well, no, I mean... _a lot_ of the time, you’re still _my_ Time Dork, and that’s why you need to come back -- so you can be mine ag -- “

 

The Magister raises his head. “Eeeeee!” squeals Alison. She can’t help it; she starts boinging.

 

All of the life flows back into him. His fuckin’ ridiculous eyebrows spring up as he widens his eyes. His glance shuttles from side to side, and -- yes, there are the sparks again! The glints of gold light up in his dark brown irises. He opens his mouth that he can’t keep shut under any circumstances, smiling slightly in wonder, and there goes the smirk indentation, notching itself into his lower cheek. The fuckin’ ridiculous villain goatee sticks its point forward as he cocks his head and says, “Where…?”

 

“Master!” Scintilla jumps up and at him at the same time. There’s a painful-sounding _thunk,_ and she ends up flung across his lap, on her back, hips balanced on one armrest, shoulders on the other. “You did it! You’re alive! You’re back! You’re here!” She swings upright long enough to grab him by the braces of the lift harness and haul him down toward her so that they’re practically nose to nose. “You’re mine!” she cries. “I can see you; I can feel you; I can hear you; I can think to you! You’re back, and everything’s good, and I’m so, so, so, so happy! I’m as happy as...as...as...someone that’s really, really, really happy!”

 

The Magister starts a sentence again: “But where…?”

 

“Oh, you’re in the Doctor’s lab,” says Scintilla, “but don’t worry. Me and Miss Alison figured out what the problem was. The Doctor was being a complete and utter dolt, and they tried to mind-fuck Miss Alison, so Miss Alison ran away and met me. Me and her looked at the poems that the Doctor had given her, and we figured out that you were the gun with the power to kill, but without the power to die, and that they had shot you at the Finisterran vampire, but they couldn’t really separate your evil from the rest of you. So they used you without your consent and weaponized all of you, which is why all your memories went _puke_ everywhere. So they hung you up and shoved you away in here. It wasn’t because they needed to fix you, but because they knew that they had done something evil to you. And they realized that you were too dear for their possessing and started feeling a cureless remorse that was the adequate of Hell.

 

“So me and Miss Alison said, _Fuck this shit.”_ Scintilla tosses her head impatiently. _“The Doctor’s just pouting, but me and her need our robot again!_ \--Which is why we found the master, uh, Master controller and pressed the buttons at the same time, even though you told us not to, but please don’t be angry at Miss Alison!” In her excitement, Scintilla shakes at the Magister’s braces, still keeping him about eight centimeters from her face, oblivious to his attempts to achieve uprightness.

 

“If you have to be angry at someone, be angry at me because I told her about the secret master Master controller, even though you told me never to do that. But I had to tell her, Master! I had to!” She pushes herself up a little bit, looking right into his eyes and raising her voice. “She was so, so sad without her robot, and you told me to keep her safe and whole and happy. I had to give you back to her so she could be safe and whole and happy, so...um…” For once, Scintilla actually stops talking of her own accord and unhands the Magister’s braces.

 

In that moment of silence, something passes between the two robots, an instantaneous psychic communication. Both of them share the bright and peaceful smile of coming back home and knowing that your person understands everything. The Magister accepts all that Scintilla has done. “Yes, Scintilla. I know. Thank you,” he says, his voice soft, but joyful. “But you haven’t answered the question I was trying to ask. Where is my Domina?”

 

Scintilla must be thinking the answer to him, for she releases him and dumps herself awkwardly from his armrests. He straightens his core, undoes his seat belt, and stands in the space between the edge of the wheelchair’s seat and the foot plate. He looks at Alison. “Ah,” he says, all open and welcoming, “there you are. Thank you.” He says in that sentence everything that he thought to Scintilla: _I’m back; you’re here; I understand._

 

He starts to take a step toward Alison, but clips his shin on the foot plate and nearly falls. “Master!” Scintilla catches him by the elbow.

 

“Thank you.” He draws himself up, then turns back toward Alison and realizes that she hasn’t moved. “Domina!” He begins to push off toward her with that fast, sure stride, but halts after a single step. “Domina, you are shaking! What’s wrong?”

 

“I...I...I...got mind-fucked,” says Alison, coming down from her jumping to connect her soles fully with the floor, “again...by that Finisterran...thing. Then it dropped me, and I broke my brain.” Even though she’s trying to stay fixed to the floor, the world begins to whirl loosely around her ears. “Then I got drugged and jammed in hospital and nearly mind-fucked for a third time by...by...by...the Doctor.”

 

“What?” he cries, coming one step closer. “Domina!”

 

She doesn’t look at him or quit talking because then she’ll cry. “Then I had to run away,” she goes on, “and deal with them screaming outside my door and giving me asinine poems that didn’t tell me where you were. And then, when I found you, you were hung up, and it was all wrong, so I...I...I...tried to help you. I put you in your chair so that you could be comfortable, but...I just wanted the sparks…” She begins shivering, and her dizziness increases with each tremor. “It was a silly fairy tale, and you were still dead. You were dead! You were dead…”

 

“Oh, Domina _carissima..._ I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there.” He comes forward another step, cautiously, as if unsure what her response will be. “Listen to me, though, my dear. It was all wrong, but you helped me. You did.” He holds his arms out and takes another step.

 

Alison wraps her arms around herself, just to hold herself together. “I had to think about their asinine poems until my brain hurt and I realized that they had violated you.”

 

“I’m so very sorry,” he says again. “You and Scintilla -- I am glad of your help. I owe you a debt of gratitude, dearest Domina, and I thank you. I wish that you needn’t have done any of this detective work, that you never had to figure out what passed between me and the Doctor, that you never saw me as I was. I wish that I could have saved you from grief. I’m so very sorry that you’re hurting so much.”

 

“You know…” whispers Alison. The sentence doesn’t go anywhere, so she tries again. “You know… You know what…?”

 

“What?” he says in a low secret voice, as if it’s only the two of them in the universe.

 

“You know what the first thing I said was when I woke up in hospital? It…It...It...was just like what you said, only it was for you, not me. _I want my robot,”_ she says, her voice scratchy from dropping down so far in volume. “The Doctor didn’t understand me; they gave me my toy bot. I said, _I want my robot. I want the one with the fucking ridiculous eyebrows and the amber sparks in his eyes. I want the one who keeps me happy and holds me fast. Where’s my robot?”_

 

“Here,” says her robot. “I’m right here.” She’s about to sink, but her robot catches her, steadying her with his firmly grounded body. “I’m here,” he says, “and you are my good Domina, and I have you right up against my hearts where you should be.”

 


	11. Alison Enters the Magister's Study

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison sees what the Magister's private rooms look like. She learns a lot about him and also some of his experiences at his end of the Finisterran vampire.

Alison dreams. She feels like she’s been lying on this dank stone floor in this stone crypt forever. Limp and exhausted, she wants nothing more than to go soft and lie still, but she’s too cold. Her muscles remain stiff, and her body seizes up in shivers as her flesh tries to generate its own warmth.

 

Slowly, though, quickness and comfort return. The Magister is with her. He cradles her in his lap and blankets her in his cape. It’s black velvet, as heavy as a duvet; when he pulls it around her, she no longer feels the chill of the damp floor against her legs. Instead a close heat envelopes her, and the weight of the cape suppresses the increasingly infrequent shivers.

 

He speaks to her, overriding her misery with a spiel of words: _Stay with me; rest with me; be here with me. I am your Magister; you are my good Domina. Let me guard you; let me keep you. You are my Domina, and you are safe._ She sighs and sighs and then sighs again, as warm as if in bed, as still as if floating in the calmest water, as safe as if in her own room. This is good; this is calm; this is safe.

 

Alison finds herself lying in her bed, her silk cap on, though she doesn’t remember lying down. Her robot is nowhere to be seen. He’s gone again. In fact, the only vaguely robotic entity nearby is her tinplate wind-up. Didn’t she drop that back in the Doctor’s Zero Room, though? Is she suffering from the worst plot device of all time: the _it was all just a dream_ bullshit? Did her memory break, along with her sense of balance, her stamina, and everything else that broke when she was dropped on her head?

 

Then she sees a card balanced atop her wind-up’s aerials. Wondering if the Doctor’s note has somehow come back to her, she unfolds the paper, knowing as soon as she sees the words that it’s not from them. Each letter, inscribed with a super fine mechanical pencil tip, stays perfectly within the confines of the invisible square of graph paper that seems to have been used as a guide. Written in compact regularity, the words strut in rank across the page. The style possesses neither serif nor flourish, yet it has no need to, for its very perfection is ornament enough.

 

_My dear --_

 

_You fell asleep in my arms, so I took the liberty of putting you to bed. I hope that this missive finds you rested and renewed, free of pain, vertigo, and prostration._

 

_I pray that you might forgive my trespass in touching your hair. I know that you forbade me. However, with the griefs you have suffered of late, I thought it might be best if I did not add to those the frustration of your hair being partially flattened._

 

_When you feel ready, do please come to me in my study, as I should like to speak to you. I would have you know of my experience with that thing and what passed thereafter. Most of all, however, I wish to thank you for the way in which you held me fast._

 

_Your robot_

 

Rereading the note, Alison realizes that the Magister has used no names in it -- not for the Finisterran vampire, not for him, not for her -- but with different effects depending on the subject. The vampire’s namelessness reduces it to contemptible status; as an unspecified _thing,_ it is too base to deserve any identity. By contrast, the Magister omits her name and his because they are close enough to each other so that they can yield the formality in favor of the warmth.

 

Scintilla tells Alison that she has slept an entire night. Indeed, as the Magister wished, she feels clear, calm, and collected. After usual morning preparations, she seeks from Scintilla directions to the Magister’s study. Scintilla personally escorts Alison, providing exhaustive detail about her latest foray into increasing her fine motor dexterity. She wants to manually reproduce and illuminate one of the Magister’s medieval herbals. Alison listens in fascination as Scintilla details the contents of a book whose contents are half horticultural, half magical.

 

Scintilla leaves Alison outside the Magister’s study door, which is covered with as much gratuitous Goth ornamentation as is Scintilla’s clock case. Like the Doctor’s lab, the door bears a Latin legend. It’s from from the same section of Virgil’s _Aeneid,_ no less, in which the Cumaean Sibyl gives Aeneas a verbal map of the underworld. _Facilis descensus Averno._ Literally, this is _Easy is the descent to the underworld,_ although most people tend to say _hell_ instead. To Alison, the Doctor’s door promises trial and tribulation, but the Magister’s door entices her into an obscure land of forbidden knowledge. She enters.

 

The rectangular room has the snugness of a bedroom. On the small side, it has a flat panel ceiling, coffered in squares that are the color of a dark chocolate bar. Heavy drapes of the ancient Greek purple -- nearly blue, nearly black -- flow across the walls. The carpet shows a star field upon the black of space, smeared with galaxies in pale pastel hues. The space is lit mostly by spotlights, though track lighting traces the edges of many bookcases, along with couches so deep and soft that they seem to melt into the shadows. Because of the way they are lit, the outlines of the furniture seem to emit a dim glow, as of orange transformative magma roiling beneath a deceptively solid surface. Alison picks her way carefully inward.

 

This isn’t a study, she thinks. This is a wizard’s work room. The dim shelves contain far fewer books than they do other pieces of mystical paraphernalia. Orreries of extraterrestrial star systems nestle by specimen jars that had better not be full of what she thinks they are. Two cupped mechanical palms proffer a crystal ball that seems to look in upon an ocean. Dessicated conjoined snakes forever coil around the glass tubing of an alembic. Scrolls, wands, and twisted horns stand in canisters made of velvety orangish scales. There is a disturbingly high number of jawless human [or Time Dork] skulls serving as bookends.  A sweet odor -- pipe or cigar smoke? -- lingers faintly in the folds of the purple drapes.

 

Turning to her left, Alison encounters a silent throng upon whom the wizard has practiced his art. Alison is used to barely articulated forms of molded plastic, with pleasant and characterless faces to serve as the perfect canvas for her work. These figures, slightly larger than her thirty-centimeter fashion dolls, appear to be entirely hand-done, from the sculpted clay limbs to the elastic-strung joints to the fiber hair. These three-dimensional representations combine the exaggerated stylization of a caricature with an eye for detail down to miniature laces on miniature shoes. Technically they’re dolls, but that term seems about as accurate as using the word _rock_ to describe a gem that has been mined, cut, faceted, and metamorphosed into brilliance.

 

Two figures in particular catch Alison’s eye. One of them’s the Magister. The Magister has caricatured his own sharp face into aerodynamic angularity, dominated by eyebrows that fill half the forehead. Engraved with an expression of clownish glee, the figure wears the black uniform of its creator. Both arms outstretched, it offers two tiny mechanical things to the other doll.

 

The other doll is Alison, but as she’s never seen herself. The Magister’s bold style has distilled her to a narrow face, all features finely incised, except for two: the eyes and the brows. At least twice as large as they should be, the glass eyes open wide, doors by which all the wonder of the universe may enter. The irises, a brown as dark as twilight, surround massive pupils as brilliant as the sun. Over the eyes, the straight and pointy eyebrows stretch their wings, leaping with joy. The figure’s mouth turns in an asymmetrical smile of amusement and understanding, and its hair radiates from its head in a perfect sphere of brown glory. Head slightly cocked, it holds its own hands out to receive from the other figure the little mechanical things.

 

The outfit gives Alison pause, as he’s never seen her wear anything remotely close. The figure wears a light blue A-line dress with a white Peter Pan collar. Puffed sleeves fit tightly from bicep to wrist, and there’s at least one lacy petticoat sending the mid-calf skirt into a wide flounce. Over that there’s a white pinafore apron with shoulder ruffles and front patch pockets. Add to that the black-and-white-striped stockings and black Mary Jane pumps, and it would be your stereotypical Alice in Wonderland kit, except for two things. First, the entire outfit is covered with splatters of mud and gouts of dried blood. Second, a pen -- or is it a sword? -- hangs at the figure’s back, equally well used.

 

Grinning, Alison looks up and around. “Magister?” All is silent, no movement from the copious shadows. Figuring that he must have stepped out for a moment, Alison walks through a small swirl of old cigar smell to the far side of the room. Maybe she’ll just lie down here on this couch in the gentle darkness and drowse in the banked coal light of the track lights until…

 

A solid form in the corner catches Alison’s attention. It vaguely resembles a classic Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, being a person-size container crowned with a stylized head. This coffin, though, spreads at least thrice as wide and at least one and a half times high. Made of dull black metal, it hinges into a front and a back, the lid lockable by three massive hasps that are currently open. The head on top shows no funerary portrait, only a robotic death’s head. Alison identifies the machine as an iron maiden, one of those torture devices lined with spikes to impale people. She’s seen illustrations, but never an actual specimen, so she opens it up.

And there’s her robot inside, eyes closed, lying as if in state. The stabby parts of the iron maiden sit, unengaged, well away from him. “Fuck!” Alison runs her fist into her palm. “Are you dead again?”

 

“Domina!” He twitches and rouses himself exactly as she does when waking. “My apologies!” He shakes his head. “I was only thinking, but I must have...dozed...off…?” The sentence trails away, as if even he cannot believe the logical conclusion.

 

“You told me you didn’t sleep at all.” Alison arches an eyebrow at him.

 

“I did,” he acknowledges with a single nod, levering himself from the iron maiden with both arms. Alison steps back to allow him passage. “And yet I can only conclude that my recent weaponization and evacuation have altered both my hardware and my software in...unforeseen ways.”

 

“Ooooh, shit.” Alison winces in sympathy. “Well, that makes two of us. I’m so sorry, robot of mine. Does...um… Does the Doctor know?”

 

The Magister walks past her. His steps, usually calibrated and executed with precision, falter. He stands in front of one of the deep sofas, looking down into it. Then he faces her, sharpening each word into a dart, though not for her: “The Doctor knows that they have transgressed against their Master, not only in the act of disobedience, but also in the violation of which it was constituted. They know as well that I have withdrawn for a short period and that I will not return until I am ready to administer the appropriate disciplinary consequences and remedial education.”

 

Alison thinks of what she remembered from the Magister’s mind: how he first tortured the Doctor. “Fuck, Magister! Wait a minute,” she says, “What kind of consequences? Like _Forget your perfect pitch; forget too what you have lost. Then come to me in your extremity and beg me to restore you. I am your Master, and you will obey me_ kind of consequences?”

 

“Domina! No! Where…? How…? Why…?” The brown dwindles in his complexion, leaving a wan yellow. First his face collapses, eyebrows drifting down, mouth floating loose. Then he himself collapses, plunking onto the couch. “Dear me… The bomb… Then you…” He looks at her like she has just entirely mastered him with some power that he never expected her to possess.

 

“Oh God!” Alison claps her hands over her mouth. “Oh shit! Oh no! What’s wrong? What’d I do? What’d I say? Why…? Scared…? But...I don’t… Please don’t yell at me! Please don’t yell at me!”

 

“Domina -- please -- “ He comes to himself a bit, leaning forward upon the cushions, as his color returns. _“Tace… Tace..._ sh sh sh…”

 

But Alison can’t stop talking, now that she has started, for she’s not talking to him at all, but the person in the past who did do to her what she pleads the Magister not to. “Whatever I did, I didn’t mean to do it. Whatever I said, I didn’t mean to say it. Whatever I thought, I didn’t mean to think it. I’m sorry.”

 

“Oh no…” he says with a sigh, drawing his hands down the length of his face. “Please -- listen to me! I am not angry; I don’t ask your apology. I’m not legislating your thoughts. I was but confused and taken aback.   _Tace; tace; tace; tace…”_

 

The words escape automatically, though; she has no control over them: “I just… I don’t… I’m sorry. It was wrong, and I was wrong, and it’s all wrong, and I’m sorry for it. I’m sorry for thinking and doing and saying and...and...everything.” She feels like the Doctor, apologizing all the time, for everything, over and over, as if for protection. “It’s all my fault, but just don’t yell. Please don’t yell; please don’t do anything. Do whatever you want; I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you say, whatever you tell me to. Just don’t...don’t...don’t...yell…” She laces her fingers at the back of her neck and hangs her head. Teetering on the edge of vertigo, she awaits the inevitable.

 

Alison does not expect the Magister to rise, come to her, circle his arms around her, and pull her to his chest. He is as strong and as stationary as a statue, but better because he’s warm and alive. Nor does she expect him to line her cheek with one palm and push her other cheek quite softly against his chest. The odd, four-beat syncopation of his hearts engrosses her, crowding out the automatic words.

 

“Sh sh sh, my good Domina, sh sh sh,” he says, almost chanting, running his hand again and again along the side of her face. “I will ask nothing of you; I will not harm you; I will not yell at you, and I will do nothing with you such as I did with the Doctor when they and I were young. I would only do what you tell me to so that you might be safe and whole and happy. Please understand that.” The world starts to sway a bit, and she realizes that he’s swiveling his torso from side to side, rocking her.

 

She closes her eyes. “Yes… Please… No but...please stop rocking. I like it, but not right now. Dizzy.”

 

“My apologies.” He holds himself still.

 

“Thanks.”  She closes her eyes.

 

“Oh, have I exhausted my lovely Domina?” the Magister asks, touching her mouth with one finger. She quivers and comes back instantly, looking up at him. “Ah, good,” he says with a smile. “And did you understand what I said -- that you are safe with me?”

 

She nods, too peaceful to disturb her internal silence with speech.

 

“And will you still speak with me now, as I hoped that you might?”

 

She nods again.

 

“I am glad.” He expels a long breath, of weariness more than anything. “--For,” he says, leading her to the couch, “we have much to talk about.”

 

“Yeah,” says Alison with a smirk, “starting with why you have that ridiculous iron maiden in your study.”


	12. Alison Is Held Fast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Magister explains to Alison how she helped him, even though he was unconscious. And he grants her dearest wish.

Alison and the Magister sink into velvety, grape-colored upholstery. He puts his right arm around her as she props herself against him, tucking her body next to his. He snaps his fingers, a gesture that seems to act as a personal cue for the activation of his psychic powers, and closes the door of the iron maiden telekinetically. Alison startles as the lid latches with a definite click, followed by the sound of the three hasps shutting in unison.

 

He turns off some of the spotlights over certain bookcases -- telekinesis is really convenient! -- and brings more light nearer to their couch. A tender and diffuse radiance, as of candlelight, surrounds them, coming from no discernible source. Alison cuddles against him, safe in their own cozy little world created by the soft globe of light. “Robot of mine…” she says, her voice a little tremulous.

“Yes, _mea_ Domina _carissima?”_ His right hand passes firmly over her forehead, smoothing it, then down along her cheek and under her jaw. As he turns her face toward his, he turns inward toward her, his head tilted to the side.

It’s so hard to look directly at him when he’s looking at her as if she’s the source of all the light in the world. Somehow it’s embarrassing, even slightly painful.  “Ah…well…you touch me. You touch my face, my jaw, like you are now. You hold my face in your hands; you touch my mouth, like _shhhhh,_ but not.”

“I do. Shall I do differently?”

“No, no. I like that. Very much.”

“I can tell,” he says, moving his thumb back and forth on her lower lip.

If he has a power button, she obviously has a _pay attention_ button right there because, for some reason, her breath stops in her throat for a split second. She closes her eyes and rests her head on his arm. “How, um, can you tell?”

“Because of what you’re doing now. It’s as if you were holding your breath all your life, but I have finally told you to let go. You start moving again, but slowly and down. You don’t hold yourself against gravity; you give yourself to it. You come closer to me. I feel your whole body sighing, and, when I touch you like that, I can feel you smile.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. I feel so…still. That’s what I like: the shock, the stillness, the safety. Um, thank you. Thank you for doing that. It makes me, um, really happy.”

“Good. I’m glad. I would not do anything that made you feel otherwise.”

“So…can I touch you?”

“I would be very happy if you did. I do have two caveats, though.” He specifies his hard limits. First, given his lack of interest and indeed aversion to what he calls _erotic activities,_ he doesn’t want her to touch him to get herself off. Second, he forbids her from touching him with her mouth. Kisses, licks, bites, and any other oral actions revolt him with the thought of bacterial contamination.

Alison will abide by his hard limits. “I don’t even want to kiss you anyway. For me that’s what you call an _erotic activity,_ but what we do isn’t.”

“Ah, good. Nor for me. And how would you touch me, Domina _carissima?_ ” he says, cocking his head. “Would you watch my features as they flickered from expression to expression? Would you see if you could find wherefrom the golden sparks arise? Would you describe the traces of a smirk on my face?” One of his fingers marks the angle of a smile line around the side of her mouth. “Or perhaps the fine etching of all the times I’ve smiled so much when I’ve seen you that my eyes have closed in glee?” With a much lighter touch, he taps his index finger at the outside edge of one of her eyes where the branching wrinkles are already starting to develop. “Or maybe you’d just like to see for yourself if my eyebrows truly are as _fuckin’ ridiculous_ as they look.” And his thumb goes from the inner edge of one of her eyebrows, across it, up to the peak of its little outer hook, then down.

Alison recalls that, when she found him in the Doctor’s lab, she was admiring him in a way that she never would have had the nerve to do when he was awake. She was talking to herself, talking to him, about what she saw, one of the most notable sights being his _fuckin’ ridiculous eyebrows._ “Oh God! Oh fuck! I’m so sorry! You could hear me? You were…awake? Oh no! Oh n – “

 _“Tace,”_ he says, touching the center of her lips once. _“Tace,_ Domina _carissima,_ and remember who you are.”

He may not have been fully conscious, but he was awake, and he did hear her, and he remembered every word. She knows because he’s echoing what she wanted to say to him when she saw him in the Doctor’s lab. She wanted to say, _Tace, mi Magistre!,_ not to shut him up, though, but more like to remind him who he was. She wanted to wake up the sparks in his eyes.

Closing her eyes, she cringes, and the cringe bows her head, hunching her torso around itself. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, _mi Magistre._ I probably…” All the hairs stick out on her arms like exclamation points as she realizes something. “That was objectifying, wasn’t it? I objectified you without your permission…and after everything you’d just b – “

 _“Tace.”_ He speaks again, his smile broadening. “You are my good Domina, right?”

Alison nods a little bit.

“And you trust me, right?” When she nods again, he goes on. “And so then I needn’t ask you if you will listen to what I say before assuming that you know what’s on my mind.”

Alison shakes her head.

Her robot tells her that she and Scintilla guessed correctly when they thought that the Doctor had weaponized him, firing his evil – in other words, his thoughts, feelings, memories, and self – at the Finisterran vampire to defeat it. They did not ask his permission; they did not forewarn him; instead, in their haste to rescue Alison, they switched him off and turned him into a gun.

\--A sentient one, however. Again, Alison’s guess was correct; the Doctor hadn’t turned him all the way off. They had shut off his ability to move, but not his consciousness. When the Doctor weaponized him, they removed his ability to send psychic messages of his own volition, or otherwise he would have alerted them telepathically to the fact that he was still aware. Thus he was stuck in a state between waking and dreaming. He could tell that something was happening to him, but the Doctor had given him no context, so he did not know exactly what was going on. He could only watch as his self-control vanished and pieces of himself went flying, no longer under his own power.

The Doctor saved Alison and hurried her into their experimental Zero Room for humans. Then they finally calmed down and began to think rationally…about her at least. Their alarm and terror over what they had done to him, however, remained. Realizing the gravity of their error, they hit a peak of panic and shame that, as, again, Alison and Scintilla accurately surmised, motivated the Doctor to hide him on account of their own shame.

He realized soon enough that he was in the Doctor’s robotics lab, but he remained disoriented. His thoughts were all disorganized, uncontrolled, unmastered. He still lacked the ability to move, and he could not call for help telepathically. He hung, aware enough to know of his entrapment, unaware enough to free himself.

Then came his loveliest, dearest Domina. Somehow she knew that the Doctor had done something wrong, and somehow she knew where to find him. She unstrung him, let him down, gave him a place to sit, and talked to him. She touched him, telling him how much she grieved that he wasn’t awake and how she wished that she could bring him back. And she told him a story, a fairy tale about an Unmaker in a Labyrinth who was rescued when a broken person came to him and struck a bargain with him for his freedom and her own.

“Your story saved me, my dear,” her robot says, his voice soft and gentle. “Your story gave me a familiar foundation upon which to place my disordered thoughts. Your story marked time and space for me, reminding me where I was and who I was. Your story dispelled my fear because I knew that, even if the Doctor had temporarily gone from me, you hadn’t, and you would do everything you could to help me. Your story pleased me and gave me something other to think about than what had happened to me.”

Cupping her chin in both hands, he lifts her face. “Listen to me. Your story held me fast. _You_ held me fast. You are my wonderful, my sweet, my lovely, my good Domina, and…I…I…thank you.” There’s a moment’s silence; then a wry curl comes to his mouth. “Oh, by the way, I am quite happy with the way that you touched me…and even the reference to my _fuckin’ ridiculous eyebrows.”_ The right wiggles in illustration. “If you would do so again, I should be pleased.”

She smiles at him, a smile that springs up from deep inside her and just comes shining out of her. Her body is full of light; her smile is full of light; there are sparks in his eyes, and he’s smiling too. They’re just full of light, and they’re at the center of their own little sphere of lamp light, now that they’re together as they should be.

But…they’re still sitting side by side. And he’s touching her; he’s reminding her who she is, which is good, but… She wants to be as close to him as she was when he said, _I’m right here, and I have you up against my hearts where you should be_. She wants to sit on his lap so that he can hold all of her and she can lean against him. She shivers a little with embarrassment. She shouldn’t want to do that, to nestle in someone’s lap. It’s so childish. She shakes her head. “Um…I… I, um, want to ask you something.”

 

“Yes, Domina?”

“Um, there was a fairy tale that you told me when you were trying to calm me down after my Shalka brain hole opened up again. The Villain said to the Domina, _Hold me fast, and fear me not._ I want to do that to you in real life. I want to hold you fast; I want to hug you. And I…um… This is really hard to say.” She runs her fingertips in circles on the fuzzy knap of the dark purple cushions.

“I shall listen.” He holds her hands to keep her from fidgeting.

“I want… Oh! I want… No. Ugh, I’ve wanted this for so long, and I still can’t say it.” She closes her eyes.

“Shall I best encourage you by remaining silent or by speaking?”

“Well, if you acted like you wanted to hear what I had to say, that would probably help. Not that you’re acting uninterested. I just mean… Well, some prying questions would be great.”

“So then…I know you are quite embarrassed, but I should very much like to know what it is that you want. Will you please tell me?”

“I… Um… I’m so embarrassed!”

Her robot is silent for a few moments. “Open your eyes. Look at me.” Alison does. The amber flecks are shining in his dark brown eyes, everything about him curving up with happiness, as if he wants to encircle her. Turning toward her, he says very simply, “Obey me.” He says it without any incantatory heft, merely as if it’s an instruction that’s the next step in the process.

 

He’s smart, her robot. Knowing that her desire to please him is competing with her chagrin, he strengthens that desire by telling her to do something. He gives her an unignorable command because he knows that she wants to please him more than she wants to disappoint him. The command functions not only as an order, but also as a promise; if she does what he says, she’ll be happy, and so will he. In other words, he knows how to make voluntary obedience its own reward.

 

She blurts it out: “I was hoping that I could sit in your lap and I could put my arms around you and you could put your arms around me and hug me, not just like a hug, but like tight enough so I can’t do deep breaths, and keep me…hold my head against your breast so I can only lean against you…and…um…hold me fast, and fear me not. Oh God, it sounds so silly when I say it out loud.” She starts grinning hugely, goofily, ducking her head.

 

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that her robot has the same irrepressible smirk of satisfaction on his face. “My lovely, obedient Domina… I believe I should like to hold you fast now _._ May I do so?”

 

“Eeeee!” She kind of squeals or cries [no, it couldn’t have been a sob – she doesn’t sob] and jumps at him.

 

That doesn’t really work, so her robot slips his left arm around her back, his right in the crook of her knees, then pulls her up against his chest, as if her weight means nothing to him. He settles her sitting sideways between his legs, her knees over his right thigh.

 

He wraps his arms about her, folding his hands and resting them under her left arm, down by her waist. Pulling her closer to him, he actually moves her entire body a few centimeters. He makes a space between his chest and his arms that’s narrower than her width so that, when she breathes, her ribs don’t expand all the way. She feels like she’s kind of wedged or stuck, which is fine with her because she doesn’t want to slip free.

 

She leans against him. The weave of his jacket feels to her as soft as a cat’s fur, only smooth. The gentle ebb and flow of his chest mimics respiration, and there are double heart-like pumps inside his breast that she cannot really hear. But she can feel his pulses, vibrating minutely out from him and into her, against her cheek. He moves his left hand up and around the left side of her face, pushing her down against his chest, holding her there, both her head and her core.

 

Between his torso beneath her and his arms around her, she can do nothing but rest upon him. The front of him moves in a slow undulation with every breath or simulation thereof, carrying her along with it. She feels his weight and his strength all about her. He is the water, and she is the vessel, and he will bear her.  


	13. Alison Tells the Magister What to Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alison tells her robot that he has to assert his personhood to the Doctor. He's not too thrilled with the prospect.

Eventually Alison turns to the Magister with a question. Why did he nearly faint when she asked about the Magister’s consequences for the Doctor’s transgression? He responds that he was shocked to hear almost verbatim in her mouth his words from a memory that he had never shared with her: that of his days at the academy. After a moment of terror, he then concluded that, when he was weaponized, it wasn’t just thoughts and memories of his evil actions that went flying, but other experiences as well.

 

His memory of saving the Doctor in the rainy cemetery, the Magister explains, is his dearest. It is the first time that anyone ever saw him for who he was, rather than who he wasn’t. It also represents the moment when the game of torture grew into a game of mutual joy and pride. It signifies the point at which he truly became the Master. 

 

This memory of the Magister’s anchors him in tempest, guides him home when he has lost his way, and forms the very foundation of his self-control. This memory, the keystone of his being, slipped when he was weaponized, streaming from him as did so many other aspects of himself. As an innocent bystander, his Domina suffered from his unconscionable loss of control and felt the memory as her own. He asks for her forgiveness for this unintentional, but no doubt painful, violation of her mind.

 

Alison protests. She acknowledges that some part of his mind went into hers without her permission. However, she considers this no violation. During the last few days, she has relied on his memory. When she is distressed, she says, she recalls the vivid, immersive experience of the Magister saving the Doctor. She accentuates some portion of it that will bring her the most peace and dives back in, replaying it until she relaxes. His memory, she states emphatically, does not give pain. In fact, it banishes pain [of the emotional variety at least] so that she can sleep well. She accepts his apology, but also thanks him for his unexpectedly helpful gift.

 

The Magister listens to her in thoughtful silence, a dubious crease among the many upon his forehead. Eventually he allows that she may have benefited from his memory leakage. However, her absorption of his foundational memory also signifies yet another grievous result of his weaponization. The Doctor’s conversion of him into a grenade injured not only  _ that thing, _ but also himself and his Domina. While she does not consider herself hurt by the Magister’s memory leakage, the Doctor’s transgression put her at risk as well. Thus the Doctor failed to keep her safe and whole and happy, and they broke her contract. With a sigh and a glower, he swears to her that he will impress upon the Doctor the wrongness of their actions and quit them of such in the future.

 

He also promises that he will always guard her, guide her, defend her, and keep her. “--Unless, of course, I am pressed by circumstances beyond my control to separate from you,” he amends, his voice sinking, “as I must whenever I am the Doctor’s gun.”

 

“No.” Alison, twisting around in his lap, stares into her robot’s face as if she can impart strength to him through the vehemence of her assertion. “You’re  _ my _ robot, which means that you’re a person, and, from now on, they’re going to respect that. You’re never going to be their gun again unless you consent and define the terms.”

 

Pulling away from her, the Magister loosens his grip from her. He holds his hands out to the side, bent at the elbows, in self-presentation. “Ah, lovely Domina, but there you are wrong. You see before you the Doctor’s cleverest invention and most useful tool. Elegantly engineered for a multitude of miserable purposes, it protects its owner, assassinates their enemies, poisons hope, and kills joy. Perhaps most useful of all is its perfect programming, designed to relieve its operator of any direct responsibility for wrongdoing.”

 

“Oh,” Alison whispers, almost swallowing the syllable.  _ “Oh.” _ The Magister makes merry with the words, but all she hears is the distance and divorce in the connotations. There’s the impersonality of  _ it, _ instead of the specificity and personness of  _ I _ or even  _ he. _ There’s the helplessness of  _ service,  _ being wielded as a  _ tool _ that cannot control its own programming, however perfect. And there’s the loneliness and misery as he describes himself as the antithesis to joy. “You’re so -- “  _ \--Sad. _ “You must be -- “  _ \--In so much pain.  _ “I didn’t really know that you meant -- “  _ \--It so literally. _ “I’m sorry…” 

 

He ignores her. “If such a tool possessed any will of its own, it would be irrelevant, indeed noxious,” he says. His tone changes. Now he speaks in the low, mechanical whisper of the words that aren’t your own, but have been said to you so many times that your brain has memorized them for easy access whenever you really need to hate yourself. “This tool has been upgraded into an acceptably compliant object. Therefore you must understand how perilous it would be for it to claim any desires of its own. To desire is to wish; to wish is to see the future; to see the future is to know that things could be different; to know that things could be different is to foment revolution; to revolt is to disobey, and to disobey is to do evil.” 

 

“What? No! Please! Listen! You know that’s not true! You might feel like it’s true now,” says Alison, “and I understand that. You’re hurt; you’re exhausted, and you feel like death that’s been warmed over, pounded into the ground, and then shit upon. But objecting to violation, fighting against what was done to you -- that’s not evil! You might feel like utter crap now, but that doesn’t mean that you are utter -- ”

 

He’s not even looking at her now. “Because the nature of the tool was evil before it was upgraded, self-assertion will only lead to a degradation back into -- “

 

_ “Mi Magistre, tace!” _ She does something that she only did with one other partner, Sylvie, and only then because they were always hugging and swatting and shoving each other anyway. She lunges forward and covers his mouth with her curled hand.

 

_ Zap! _ There is no sound effect for the magical things the two of them do, certain words, certain gestures. But there really should be, if only to illustrate the shocking suddenness and swift change that they provoke. Like... _ zap! _ He changes. He meets her eyes again, his own all open in startlement. And immediately he’s still; she sees him unbind himself from the intentional rectitude with which he usually holds himself. 

 

He closes his jaw. As he does so, he bites off the almost involuntary words that were just spilling from him. Now deprived of his ability to speak such things, he seems to awaken as if summoned back to who he truly is. He lifts his head, settling it more comfortably on his spine, and the prickly ends of his mustache poke her palm. He recovers from his shock, his eyebrows relaxing into the low curves of a pleased smile, the golden lights warming steadily in his eyes. The Doctor said once,  _ He kind of blooms whenever he sees you, _ and now, without the distraction of those horrible words, he sees her. Now he brightens; now he shines. Now he’s hers again.

 

“No,” Alison says quietly, “don’t you see? To obey doesn’t have to mean suffering, not if you don’t want it to. There’s an alternative, and you’re doing it right now. To obey can mean to be quiet; to be quiet can mean to listen; to listen can mean to hear the truth, and the truth can mean that you can come back to yourself. You don’t have to break yourself in obeying. You can keep yourself.” Her right arm, having been stretched out for a few minutes, wobbles. “Fuck! Ow! Sorry. I’m putting my hand down.” She does, massaging the underside of her bicep. “Why do I always get arm cramps or cat hair in my mouth when I’m saying important things?”

 

The Magister laughs at her, but keeps absolutely quiet, the only sign of his mirth being the slight jerks of his chest up and down.

 

“Oh cut it out! It happens to you too, doesn’t it?”

 

He takes a pinch of cat hair, left by Imp, no doubt, from the sleeve of his jacket and shrugs. What does she think?

 

Both of them laugh. “Okay, now seriously -- “ Alison stretches her legs out in front of her, pointing and flexing her toes. She repositions herself so that she’s sitting lengthwise on the sofa, her lower back against a broad, plump arm rest, her legs taking up the two cushions that her robot has left for her. “You were talking about being used against your will. You said that it was expected of you. You said that you had to let the Doctor weaponize you or whatever -- or else you’d be considered disobedient and evil.

 

“But I know you and the Doctor,” Alison says thoughtfully, wagging her finger at him. “From what I’ve seen myself and from the memories of yours that you gave me, I know that both of you like a certain amount of deliberate torture, pain, and objectification. You like struggle, defiance, disobedience -- whatever you want to call it. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that the Doctor loves you because of, not in spite of, the fact that you’re a sadistic, cruel, arrogant, proud control freak. That’s what thrills them -- the fact that you can use those traits to dig deep into them and mash down on their most sensitive and vulnerable buttons.”

 

Alison takes both sides of her robot’s face in her hands. He speaks, she says, as if the Doctor requires him to be a broken object instead of a person. And she knows that the Doctor’s actions have made the Magister feel like a broken object; she knows that he’s suffering because of that. But she also knows that the Doctor would never require this type of suffering from the person they loved. She hopes that the Magister understands that she’s not contradicting his feelings, just his assumptions. If he tells the Doctor that they’re wrong to treat him this way, that he must be respected as their equal, they will listen and change accordingly.

 

Furthermore, she goes on, while the Magister’s creation by the Doctor entails the Doctor’s control over him to a certain extent, there is no consequent obligation for him to be their tool. His words indicate that he feels that he must accept such misuse, but again he assumes incorrectly. He does not have to submit to weaponization and other nonconsensual exploitation.

 

Besides, says Alison, the Magister doesn’t even want to be the Doctor’s gun. Okay, maybe it’s a way for him to convince himself that he’s keeping his inevitable spouse and his Domina safe by allowing himself to be launched at enemy forces, but that’s really not how he envisions himself. “You want to be who you were when you were saving the Doctor’s life back in the academy; I know you do,” she says. “You want to be powerful and gentle and devoted and brave and kind for the people you care about. You want to be evil to those who would harm the people that you protect. That’s what being the Master of your fate and the captain of your soul is for you. A life as the Doctor’s gun doesn’t make you the captain of your soul. It just breaks you and kills you, bit by bit, but it’s a neverending torture because you’re the one with the power to kill, but without the power to die.”

 

The Magister opens his mouth, but only lets out a sigh, then closes it again.

 

“What?” says Alison. “You can talk, you know. That  _ tace _ was just for earlier, when you were saying all those horrible things about yourself, and you wouldn’t shut up.”

 

“It was a fond and childish dream of mine,” he admits, sounding almost shy, “to believe that I had magic.” He found proof of his own powers in the events of his very life. He had died during a prolonged and difficult birth, but then regenerated. The blast of regeneration energy killed his delivering birth mother and one of his care mothers, so, by the time he was fully born, he had already endured and survived his own death and that of half his parents. 

 

Throughout his lives, the Magister survived the most prodigious disasters by luck, by wit, by coincidence, and by skill. In the case of his final regeneration, he sustained himself despite the unremitting pain of physical decay. There was no medical, scientific explanation for his unwillingness -- indeed, his inability -- to die, though he was literally falling to pieces. He attributes his persistence facetiously to his wizardly gifts of self-preservation and seriously to brute determination. 

 

The Magister laughs when he reminisces about his last regeneration. But Alison remembers what Scintilla showed her during her first hours aboard the Magister’s ship. She saw how the Magister views himself even today: as the unhappy, vengeful, chronically suffering person he was in his final regeneration. And she knows that this outmoded idea of himself only increases his pain.

 

His voice takes on an effervescence again, not the forced gaiety of earlier in their conversation, but a renewed mischievous self-mockery. “The evidence is clear. I am not only a wizard of stupendous magic and a Master of Survival, but also an immortal robot. I waste these advantages by submitting to the Doctor’s violations and thus allowing myself to be broken and killed mentally.” 

 

“Now just a minute! I’m not blaming you for what happened to you. That’s not what I said at all!” says Alison. 

 

“I know you weren’t blaming me for what I have undergone, my dear. Please do have the grace not to interrupt my sarcastic and/or serious performance.” He gives her a minor admonishment in the form of slightly narrowed eyes. 

 

She mimes zipping her mouth closed, but gets in an eyeball roll just for good measure. 

 

The Magister rolls his eyes right back at her and resumes monologuing mode. “And so I spoil my gifts; I deplete my power. I neglect my promises to my Domina and break my contracts with her. I do not keep her safe and whole and happy; in fact, by continuing to submit to such mistreatment, I grieve her and make her sad. In short,” he says with a smirk, “while I may have a very good Domina, I am a very bad and very disobedient robot.”

 

Several snorts escape from Alison before she musters the coherency to remark, “A very sarcastic robot too, I see. Can we do anything about that?”

 

“No,” the Magister says without expression. “Sarcasm is hard-coded into the devious… ahem...into the device. Besides, it’s a feature, not a bug.”

 

Alison does fall over, but on purpose, plopping sideways into the couch cushions as she’s overcome with laughter. “You remind me of my dad -- not in general, just the computer humor. He used to answer support calls before he got into doing custom builds, and wow -- the stories he told… Like someone thought that their computer was broken because she had to, you know, click the icon to get online instead of it just knowing when to open up a browser window. At some point, he actually said to her,  _ Look -- the computer’s not supposed to read your mind. It’s a feature, not a bug, okay?” _

 

“Hmmmm…” The Magister strokes his beard, thinking hard. “Did this person try yelling at the computer? I know that escalating volume always enhances the telepathic abilities of  _ my _ electronics.”

 

“Hah!” Alison returns to an upright position. “So, my very bad and very disobedient robot, what are we going to do with you?”

 

“Hopefully something really, really...good,” he says with a positively fiendish slope to his fuckin’ ridiculous eyebrows.

 

Alison laughs again. “You do double entendres, but you don’t make everything sound sexual. You just make it sound evil, even if it’s good. --In all seriousness, though, are you going to tell them to respect you, to treat you like a person? Are you going to tell them that they need your consent before they do anything to you, especially weaponization?”

 

She loses him; his eyes drift away from her and toward at a galactic swirl on the carpet, partly covered by the mass of the sofa. “Have you ever wished to do something,” he says to the floor, “and yet been unable to unless given an external impetus?”

 

“Oh,” says Alison, nodding, “yeah. Like there was this district-wide essay contest, and people were always telling me I should enter in the history category because I wrote so well. I always wanted to because I loved history and writing, but I never did because… Well, what if I didn’t win first? Then I’d fail, and generations of Cheney women would be disappointed, even my dead ancestors. I only entered when my history tutor made it mandatory one year. Of course, I ended up winning second, and generations of Cheneys couldn’t stop bragging about it for years.” 

 

“Then,” he says, as if still ashamed to meet her eyes, “command me, and I will do it.”

 

Alison hugs him. “Do it,” she says in his ear. “Tell the Doctor that you’re their Master, not their gun. Tell them that you’re the captain of your own soul and that the two of you negotiate to mutual satisfaction before you do anything. And then do that! Negotiate; spell out your limits, which ones you can push and which ones you can’t; find out what you will and won’t consent to. Do that, and you’ll be happier. Do that, and the Doctor will be happier. Do that, and your Domina will be happier. See? Obedience doesn’t have to mean becoming evil again and miserable. If you choose to obey me, you can be happy. You can be yourself again. You can be free.”


	14. The Magister Punishes the Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scintilla explains a few things about the Magister's belongings to Alison. Then Alison and Scintilla spy on the Magister yelling at the Doctor.

Alison realizes the next day that she never asked her robot the truly important questions. First, why does he have an iron maiden in his wizard’s wonder cabinet? Second, why is the little Alison doll dressed kind of like Alice in Wonderland? And what is the little Magister doll giving the little Alison doll?

 

The Master’s not around for breakfast, but the omniscient, omniloquent [if there’s not an adjective for _all-talking_ modeled along the lines of _omniscient,_ there really should be, so Alison makes one up] Scintilla is, and she’s thrilled to provide Miss Alison with answers on anything and everything. Alison’s especially curious about the iron maiden, which is, of course, total bullshit. Anyone who knows anything about history and/or torture and/or BDSM knows that such a device never existed anywhere in the medieval ages. Iron maidens were pieced together from other torture devices by people who wanted to make the medieval period seem more violent and _uncivilized,_ a word that Alison uses advisedly, than they really were.

 

Scintilla replies that of course the iron maiden is a spurious piece of equipment. She knows this for a fact because the Magister got the idea for it sometime back in the 1980s. He time traveled first to acquire the pieces for such fictional hybrid devices and then to place the devices and stories of their false origins. Credulous reports in scholarly works of the iron maiden’s lethal history have amused him ever since. Incidentally, the one in his study is the original iron maiden of Nuremberg. Contrary to popular belief, it was not lost during the Allied bombing of 1944.

 

Alison nods. “Okay. I’ll admit it; I’m impressed. That was clearly the most gratuitous, complicated, and trivial con I have ever heard of. All hail the Master of Bullshit!”

 

Scintilla transmits her reaction to the Magister, who’s in Anima’s library, waiting for the Doctor to get up. After listening for a moment, Scintilla laughs and reports that the Magister is pleased that his Domina is beginning to treat him with proper respect.

 

Next Alison asks Scintilla about the dolls of her and him. Scintilla, who regularly sees what her owner does in his mind’s eye, explains that the Magister’s mental version of Alison is dressed like that. Not only is she shining and bouncing, but to him she’s _Alison Wonderland,_ surrounded by impossibility, but undaunted and curious, with a vorpal pen that she uses to slay monsters of injustice.

 

Alison reflects that the Magister’s internal picture of her must be quite a laugh, dressed up like a fictional character, bouncing like a kangaroo, bloodstained, and shining like a neon sign. But then, as if he’s touched her on the lips again, she stops, realizing how she appears through his eyes. She’s so radiant that her very flesh cannot contain her radiance, so strong that even her body can’t control the spring in her step. She’s so inquisitive and perceptive and sarcastic that her eyes become the larger for it, so stalwart that she impales Jabberwocks with words, then keeps on going. Amazing and even fearsome, she is the Domina, worthy partner to the Magister, and he apparently really likes her.

 

As for little mechanical things that little Alison receives from the little Magister, those, Scintilla says, are robotic replacements for her currently broken hearts. He can’t fix them, so he offers her new ones.

 

“But why are there two?” Alison inquires of Scintilla.

 

 _“I certainly can’t give you only one, my dear!”_ says Scintilla, repeating his words directly, even down to tone and inflection. _“Both of them must work, after all.”_

 

“But...Time Dorks have two hearts,” Alison points out. “I’m a human. I just have one.”

 

Scintilla, listening to her owner’s response, says, “There was a definite pause there, like he was thinking about it and realizing something. Then he was like, _Oh...of course._ I should have known; I should have known!” She starts dancing around the coffin table, clapping her hands. “This is amazing; this is wonderful; this is unprecedented!”

 

“Wait...what is?”

 

“Well, the Master has always said to me, _My dearest Domina has the Master’s mind and the Doctor’s hearts.”_

 

“He said that?” Alison’s cheeks grow warm. “Then...he just compared me to the people that he thinks are the most powerful in the universe, didn’t he?”

 

“Yes, yes! The smartest and the kindest!” Scintilla, her eyes actually glowing, stops frolicking and looks at Alison, vibrating. “Don’t you see, Miss Alison? He said _hearts!_ He’s always thought of you as having two hearts, just like him, just like the Doctor. And I know that he has liked some of the previous guests that the Doctor has had aboard; he has even counted one or two as friends… Well, maybe. But this… This is more than that! He sees you as equal to him, equal to the Doctor! You! A human! But, to him, you’re a Time Dork...and not just any Time Dork. You’re on the same level as him and the Doctor. Awwww!” Scintilla presses both of her hands to her chest; plastic raps on metal. “It’s so sweet, so adorable, so perfect! You’re like his inevitable spouse part two!”

 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Alison emphasizes to Scintilla that she is in no way anyone’s _inevitable spouse._ Such a term may satisfy for the relationship between the Magister and the Doctor, as they have always been together, even when despising each other, and they have only now arrived at a mutually enjoyable marriage. But Alison and her robot have no sense of inevitable, cosmic destiny together. They chose this relationship, and it’s definitely not espousal or marriage; it’s a friendship with lots of affection and trust in it, and they’re partners. If Scintilla has to call Alison and her robot anything, she should call them _friends_ or _partners._ Inevitable spousehood deprives both of them of their much valued mastery of their fates and captaincy of their souls.

 

To escape from a subject that’s both amazing and intensely alarming, Alison wonders if she and Scintilla can peek in on the Magister and the Doctor. Scintilla pilots her ship self silently into Anima’s library and takes the form of one of the budding tree lamps. Then Scintilla in robot form and Alison sneak out of the ship. Hiding around a long, blocky bookcase of ebony wood, they listen in.

 

“Your neural net is fraying just there; an auxiliary subprocessor looks, well, fried. Oh… Oh dear, whatever happened to _that_ circuit?” The Doctor gasps.

 

“You should know.” The Magister speaks in a crackly, dry voice. “You’re the one who bombed it out.”

 

“She was right then,” the Doctor says, voice subdued. “I did hurt you.” They sigh, pause, then cry out, _“Alas, ‘tis true; I have gone here and there, / And made myself a motley to the view, / Gored_ [hiccup] _\-- Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most_ [sniff] _dear -- “_ The Doctor is now crying, mostly silent, but for protracted honks in which they inhale loose snot back up their nose.

 

“Do stop sniveling. I have no need of your nasal mucus lubricating my cerebral processors. If you wish to be truly helpful for once, dispense with the quotations and sing.”

 

“Oh. Yes [snerk], of course, Master [snerrrrrrk]. Let me just put your face plate back on -- there -- and… Heh-hem!” The Doctor coughs some phlegm from their throat [hopefully not into the Magister’s head], then hums to find their pitch. They don’t find it, then try another note. This one serves much better, and then the Doctor begins to sing.

 

Held fast by the wordless soaring sounds, Alison circumvents the bookcase. The Doctor stands in front of the seated Magister, cupping his chin in both hands, turning his face upward. His face soft and open, his eyes closed, the Magister holds his inner eyebrows up, his lips slightly parted, as if startled by speechless wonder. As for the Doctor, they have made a straight column of themselves from the base of their diaphragm all the way to the tip of their upthrust chin. Their face is sharp and fierce, their eyes closed with an expression of inward intensity, as they emanate music.

 

Alison knows that the Doctor’s voice can destroy things; after all, they essentially sang the Shalka to death. She never knew, though, that they could do the opposite. Their song gathers up the worn and fraying pieces of the Magister, mending him into someone stronger and more beautiful than before. Their song pulls together their guilt and grief, transfiguring them into a solemn vow to never hurt him again. Their song explains without words that the lover means everything to the singer. Their song begs their lover to allow himself to be held fast once more.

 

The Doctor’s song does more than merely heal; it creates anew. Their song builds a universe of novelty and amazement, even while it opens the ship of the Doctor’s soul. Their song asks the Magister to captain the two of them where he would. Their song pledges to go anywhere in this new place, just as long as the two of them are together.

 

“Look what you’ve done! You’ve grieved my Domina and my ship.” The Magister’s voice resounds, but teasingly, without true reproach.

 

Alison opens her eyes and unbites her bottom lip, upon which she has been chewing. By her side, Scintilla looks as if she too might dissolve from the painful beauty of it all. Necks relaxed, but otherwise as they were, the two Time Dorks regard her. The Doctor, with spots of color high on their cheeks and nose, give her a wide [and slightly damp] grin. Their left arm hangs at their side, but the Magister has his right hand over the Doctor’s, pressing their palm to his cheek.

 

“I’m not grieved.” Alison swallows. “That was just...stunning. That’s all.”

 

“I know you sing my Master,” says Scintilla to the Doctor, “but I never heard… I just… Wow! That is so...wow! Just...wow! I felt it right here…” She puts her hand over her chest shield. “Right here in my core processor...like really, for real. I think that, when you were singing my Master, maybe you were singing me too, you know, ‘cause I’m connected to him. I felt like I was being all organized and rearranged, but in a good way, by someone who knew what they were doing, kind of like being defragged, but somehow...gentler and stronger...and much more fun…”

 

“Thank you, thank you! I’ll be here all week!” The Doctor bows to the left and right.

 

“Was that what it sounded like?” Alison ventures. “A repair song?”

 

 _“Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast!”_ The Doctor beams. “--And to reknit the rude mechanical,” they add, winking at the Magister. The robot thrusts the Doctor’s hand aside, trying unsuccessfully to look put upon.

 

“Yeah, yeah, of course!” Scintilla pipes up, smiling at Alison. “That’s how the Doctor made him -- didn’t you know? They had all the materials, and they built him, but then they just kind of, you know, _came out_ with the music, and their song finished off all the undone bits. It activated all his neural nets and complex systems, and it brought him to back to life!”

 

“If only,” says the Magister, “I had had someone to sing me thus when I was dangling in the Doctor’s lab like a broken puppet.”

 

There’s a silence. The Doctor darts a quick look at the Magister, who cocks an eyebrow at him. Unexpectedly then, he glares, and the Doctor deflates. The red spots on their face subsume into a more general flush. They point themselves at the Magister, but don’t meet his eyes. “You...don’t forgive me, do you, Master?”

 

The Magister gives the Doctor a few seconds of silence. “Should I?”

 

Alison realizes that, despite their easy banter minutes before, they have not concluded their discussion. The Doctor has apologized, but the Magister has not responded. “Do you want us to, um -- ?” she begins, but they have zeroed in on each other again. Never one to drop a story in the middle [unless she’s truly exhausted], Alison hovers by a bookcase, trying to appear casual. Scintilla, equally curious and equally nosy, joins her hand with Alison’s. Though Scintilla’s hand is cool and hard, her supportive touch gives Alison some strength.

 

The Doctor dwindles a few centimeters in height as they bend their head. “I don’t know if you should forgive me, but I’d like it if you did.”

 

“What you _should_ do?” The Magister lunges forward in the chair, though he does not yet rise. “Let me tell you what you should do. Tell me before you weaponize me. Ask me if I have other plans for the evening. Heed my answer. A dinner out and a trip to the cinema beforehand wouldn’t go amiss either.” A bitter laugh as he thinks for a second.

 

Then the Magister rises so fast that the Doctor stumbles backward a step. “Furthermore,” he says, his voice rough, but restrained, “if you truly must indulge your irresistible urge to use my thoughts and memories for cannon fodder, do seek my consent before you do. Then turn me off -- all the way off -- first. Do -- it -- right.” Though he’s not raising his voice at all, each word of that command lands like a blow, and the Doctor flinches each time.

 

“You failed me, Doctor,” says the Magister, his voice smoothing out, as he tilts his head and smiles a truly grievous smile. “You failed me utterly. You turned off my ambulation, but you left me conscious and unable to communicate. You did not give me the power to die before you gave me the power to kill.”

 

“Oh no!” The Doctor claps their hands to their cheeks. “Master, I’m so -- “

 

The Magister snaps and stabs a finger in the Doctor’s direction. “Be still.” The Doctor freezes, immobile but for blinking, breathing, and other necessary involuntary motions. Maybe the Doctor can throw a single switch to shut the Magister’s mouth, but the Magister can throw a single thought and shut off an entire person. Alison, whose flesh is breaking out in prickles, doesn’t know what’s worse: the Magister’s ability or the fact that the Doctor lets him use it on them.

 

 _“And do I smile,”_ continues the Magister, his voice now caressingly soft, _“such cordial light / Upon the Valley glow -- / It is as a Vesuvian face / Had let its pleasure through --_ I knew what you were doing to me every single moment.” He strides around the Doctor, launching word after word from his vorpal tongue to find its home in the Doctor’s hearts. “You struck holes in my mind; you drained me; you then left me hanging in powerless isolation because you were so preoccupied with your own shame that you had no care for me.”

 

The Doctor now cries again, eyes closed. The Magister approaches within a centimeter of the tip of the Doctor’s nose. With one hand, he touches their cheek, swiping his thumb sideways to erase some of their tears. It is a gesture of ownership, rather than a gesture of care. “I am your Master,” he says, quiet and tender and terrible, “and you did not hold me fast. You violated me, my dear.”

 

“Oh…” says Alison, more to herself than anyone else.

 

“What?” Scintilla, hearing her, whispers back.

 

“They both want to be held fast,” Alison says with a gulp. “And the Doctor can cry for it, but my robot… I think he would be crying now if he could, but he can’t. He can only speak, so the Doctor… The Doctor is crying for both of them. I need to hold them fast!”

 

“Miss Alison!” Untangling her fingers from Alison’s, Scintilla grasps Alison’s upper arm, holding her back. “Don’t! You should never intervene between fighting Time Dorks, especially not if you’re a human. You’ll be hurt, and I can’t let that happen. The Master said -- “

 

“The Magister told me, _Hold me fast, and fear me not.”_ Rushing forward, Alison flings her arms around her Time Dorks.

 

Both of them are fully still for a split second. It’s the Magister who responds first, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand, then moving his arm around her. “My lovely, obedient Domina…” He then frees the Doctor, who adjusts their stance and knocks hips with Alison.

 

“Oh!” cries the Doctor. “What’s wrong?” Hugging them is like hugging a narrow, very branchy tree: all angles. Uncertain of how to deal with the person now attached to them, they pat her on the back, one tentative tap, then another. “Did the Master frighten you?”

 

“No, me ‘n’ her are never afraid of him!” Scintilla joins the circle. “We’re giving you hugs because apparently you all need ‘em.”

 

“Don’t [schnerrrrrrk] worry,” the Doctor is saying. “I only let him do that kind of mind control on me.”

 

“I know,” mutters Alison, wiggling around, halfway squashed against the Doctor, trying to position herself more comfortably. She feels as if she can count each of the Doctor’s ribs, and they’re all prodding her.

 

“Come, Doctor! Surely you know enough of humans by now to recognize a hug.” The Magister’s tone returns to its usual wryness, and he relaxes his hold on Alison, understanding that she’s still trying to arrange herself. “She perceived your distress and hoped to comfort you.” Noises of a struggle ensue as the Doctor searches in vain for an appropriate posture, followed by a whack. “Doctor! Must you stick your elbow _there?”_ The Magister recoils, and Alison loses him.

 

“Hey!” cries Scintilla. “Be nice to your Master!”

 

“Sorry, M -- “

 

“Oh, do be quiet, you buffoon. And Scintilla -- thank you very much, but I can manage my inevitable spouse quite well on my own.”

 

Okay, clearly the Magister’s on the Doctor’s other arm. Alison escapes the tangle of the Doctor’s limbs long enough to snatch up the Magister’s loose left hand. She tows him toward her and corrals him with her arm. “I’m not just comforting the Doctor! I’m comforting you too, you silly robot.” She realizes what she has just said. “Oops. I probably shouldn’t have called you -- “

 

“Silly robot, rude mechanical -- all the same thing!” says the Doctor.

 

The Magister comes close enough for Alison to lean her head on his shoulder. Mmm, he’s nice and warm and not poky. “Old quack!” he addresses the Doctor.

 

“Both of you shut up!” says Alison with a laugh. “Look -- I know I interrupted your fight, and I know it’s not over yet. But you were both saying, in so many words, that you wanted to be held fast, so I’ll hold you two if you’ll hold me.”

 

For a moment, the Doctor places themselves so that they link to her and Scintilla without unfortunate collisions. The Magister too stills, and Alison leans against him a bit. For once, even Scintilla says nothing as she stands in silence. Alison bows her head, her left arm looped around the Doctor, her right around the Magister. Scintilla, across the way from Alison, completes the circle with her left around the Magister and her right around the Doctor. And they all hold each other fast.

 


	15. They Are All Temporarily Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone's back on good terms with each other, but Alison realizes that it's time for her to leave. Suddenly no one's happy.

Two days later, Alison, though she has moved back into Anima, has been leaving the Dorks alone. Since the Doctor’s repair song and the Magister’s ensuing accusations, they have been sequestered elsewhere in Anima, who has only indicated to Alison that they are negotiating. That’s fine with Alison, as merely witnessing their fight took a lot out of her. She had to rest for an entire day. Now that she has reinstalled herself in her old quarters with Scintilla’s help, she wonders if the Dorks have come out of hiding yet.

 

She goes to the library. Naturally, almost all the TARDIS cats, including Imp, are lined up in rows, like fuzzy, snoozy loaves of bread, in the slants of eerie light coming through the light half of the library from the Time Vortex. Naturally all of them require particular combinations of pets, scratches, and compliments.

 

She also strays across the two Time Dorks. The Magister sits hunched over on the edge of a couch, his legs apart. Right elbow resting on his knee, he holds something up by his chest, bends his neck to it, and jabs at it with a craft knife. He uses natural light from the Time Vortex through the window wall, as well as several flowers of light trained on him at various angles. Alison then recognizes that he’s not stabbing something, but carving.

 

The Doctor too sits on the edge of the sofa, their legs tucked sideways, right arm around the robot, their chin on his shoulder. “What are you doing, Master?” They rubberneck, trying to see around the robot’s curled-inward form.

 

“The same thing I was doing five minutes ago.” The Magister doesn’t even glance at the Doctor.

 

“Can I see?”

 

“You’ve been clinging to me and goggling for the past three hours.”

 

“How’s it coming then?”

 

The Magister heaves a sigh of such dramatic shoulder movement that the Doctor is nearly thrown from them. Nevertheless, the Doctor stays fastened and even tightens their grasp. The Magister holds his project still for a half-second, long enough for the Doctor to see the progress, then returns to his work.

 

“Is that me?”

 

“It’s your evil twin.”

 

Alison advances and peeks around the Magister’s other side. He’s using a craft knife to incise more detail on a 1:6 scale resin head, and it’s the Doctor. There’s a knobby face, cartoonish and almost horsey in its length, with pointy, back-swept hair and squinched shut eyes, but the portrait mostly consists of mouth. Open to their widest extent, the round and sensual lips make a smile that is nearly the width of the face. There are individually modeled teeth, as well as a tongue poked into the corner of the mouth with concentration. The throat is deep and open, and there might even be a little uvula back there. The eyebrows rise at the outward edges, but angle down toward the bridge of the nose, granting the expression fierceness, pride, perhaps even a certain devilishness. It’s an ambivalent expression, full of power and joy.

 

If the Magister sees her as Alison Wonderland, then he sees the Doctor as a wonderful, beautiful, ferocious wizard whose magic may either create or destroy worlds. She remembers what the Magister said about the Doctor: _We are the same… We are everything to each other._ If she had any doubt, this portrait proves it.

 

“My mouth is open!” Sitting up, the Doctor bounces a few times.

 

“It usually is.”

 

“Am I singing?”

 

“You usually are. Quit pulling on my arm.”

 

The Doctor ignores the Magister, scooting in so they’re practically sitting on his right leg. They let out a little squeal of joy. “That’s amazing! Somehow you can capture the essential aspects of someone’s personality and render them in an inanimate medium. They look so alive when they’re done.”

 

The Magister sits back, holding the head further from his eyes. He cocks his head to one side, then the other, as he swivels the head in his hand. “Well, of course they do.” He returns to his sculpting. “That’s because they actually were alive at one time. I just used the TCE.”

 

Alison has a moment’s puzzlement. She then recalls that the TCE -- or tissue compression eliminator -- is a banned relic from the Magister’s earlier days. It was a weapon that killed people by shrinking them to...well, about 1:6 scale. When she heard about it, Alison thought that it would be a great candidate for repurposing; you could sculpt in life size, then shrink your results down to become the most detailed dolls ever. Unfortunately, though, it only worked on living beings, so the Doctor had forbidden it once the Magister had come aboard for good.

 

The squeak of delight becomes a near screech of dismay. “You said you wouldn’t!”

 

“I’ll say anything, you old fool. You should know that by now.”

 

The Doctor, realizing that the Magister is full of shit, clicks their tongue. “Tsk tsk! Bad Master, _bad!_ No biscuit.”

 

“And since I don’t eat…”

 

Alison watches the Doctor wrack their brains to define a suitable punishment for someone who’s pretty much unpunishable. “Bad Master! No Doctor!”

 

The Magister, who hasn’t even turned toward the Doctor all this time, whips around with all the speed of a striking snake. He catches the Doctor by their rumpled, cockeyed tie and hauls them forward over their gasps. “Do you truly think it wise to threaten your owner?” he says in the same voice he used when he told the Doctor that he was awake when weaponized.

 

The Doctor, slightly squished around the trachea, coughs. “Probably not.”

 

The Magister lets him go. “Ah, so you _can_ use your brain. Good. Now shut up and let me work.” He assumes his former intent position. So does the Doctor, gazing at him with ardent adoration.

 

“Hi, robot of mine! Hi, Doctor!” Alison hails them, waving.

 

“Hello, Alison!” The Doctor jerks upright so swiftly that the Magister comes along half of the way too. “Sshhh!” they say, putting their finger to their lips. “Don’t disturb your robot.” With a wink, they add, “He’s already quite disturbed already.”

 

“Indeed,” says the Magister. “And it could have something to do with this rather large...growth,” he says, as he side-eyes the Doctor, “that has recently become adhered to my left side.”

 

The Doctor widens their eyes to near circularity and blinks several times. “But I thought you said to hold you fast. And I thought you _liked_ it when I obeyed you.” Addressing Alison again as if breaking the fourth wall, the Doctor reverts to a stage whisper: “He’s pretending that he hates me! He’s a horrible lia -- !”

 

The sentence never completes, as the Magister, in one swift and elegant movement, sets his project aside, and swats the Doctor’s grip from him. He then goes back in with both hands, pulls the Doctor’s face toward his, pulls back enough to say, “I told you to shut up -- _obey me,”_ and then lets the Doctor go.

 

Panting audibly, the Doctor falls back against the couch cushions, eyes round again, but now in distraction. Shaking their head slightly, they try for some words, but the words have clearly vacated, along with most of their sense. Then they catch Alison’s eyes again, recalling their audience, and they themselves bloom, rising, lightening, and throwing their head back for a wordless moment of song that is an exclamation point of pure joy.

 

Alison jumps on her toes, clapping hard. “Bravo, bravo! Encore, encore!”

 

“Unlikely, Domina,” says the Magister, looking up at her, a smile at the corner of his mouth. “The Doctor is disturbed enough already.”

 

The Doctor throws Alison a rather dazed grin, along with two thumbs up.

 

Folding her arms, she observes, “So...it looks like you renegotiated satisfactorily.”

 

They sing a glorious sound that says much more than a simple affirmative.

 

“We did.” The Magister, on the righthand couch cushion, retrieves his knife and project and places them exactly so on a side table. “Thank you for catalyzing a most enlightening discussion.”

 

“So...are you the Doctor’s gun?” she asks.

 

He smiles, tilting his head to the side. “Inevitable spouse, yes. Robot, yes. Gun, no, not unless I wish it. You advised me to make my limits known, and now nonconsensual weaponization is a hard limit.”

 

The Doctor, sitting up on the middle couch cushion, folds in on themselves a little bit, all ebullience disappearing. “Yeah, I’m never doing that again,” they say to their lap. “I didn’t realize how much I hurt… But don’t worry, Alison!” They raise their head quickly, as if afraid that she might run away. “I always learn from my mistakes, and I never do the same thing wrong twice -- really! Ask the Master; he can tell you.” They nod quickly.

 

The Magister glances at the Doctor. “You know that apologies don’t make fear instantly dissipate.”

 

The Doctor sighs. “I wish they did, though.”

 

Alison sits in a chair across from the Magister and the Doctor, the weight of the past few days plunking into the cushions along with her. “It’s just going to take time.”

 

“I know,” says the Doctor. “But...why are you sitting all the way over there? Are you...angry at me?”

 

Alison shakes her head. “No, it’s just that you two were playing all over the couch, so I wanted to leave you room.”

 

“But that was just me flopping around! I’m done sprawling now!” More earnest nodding from the Doctor. “Oh, by the way, your robot really, really, _really_ wants to hold you fast right now,” they add, slipping a look at the Magister, who’s sitting quietly, “but he’s not saying anything because he’s waiting to figure out your mental state. But, if you want to be held fast, I… Oh! Okay! Hello there!” They jump visibly upon noticing that Alison has pretty much teleported herself into the Magister’s lap in the space of three seconds. “I’m going to scoot down toward the other end of the couch so you can have some more room.”

 

“Hi,” says Alison to the Magister’s heart noisemakers, hugging him and pressing her face against his chest. “Can I talk to you...both of you?”

 

“Certainly, _mea_ Domina,” says her robot, bringing her as close to him as possible without flattening her, “but you might wish to point your face away from my jacket if you’d like the Doctor to understand what you’re saying.”

 

“I...I need to go home,” Alison says in a small voice. “I don’t want to; I want to stay here with you, both of you, especially now that I’ve met Scintilla and I know that I have a Doctor who will always save my life and a robot that will always do everything he can to protect me. I want to travel through space and time with you; I want to learn and explore and discover. I want to do new things, exciting things, fascinating things, thrilling things, and I want to do them with you.”

 

“And yet you have enjoyed very little of your stay here with us,” says her robot softly.

 

“Awwww, Alison.” The Doctor moves sideways, closer to her and her robot. “I know I didn’t even technically invite you aboard; I know it was the Master who did, but, um, you know that I always wanted you to come along, right? It’s because… Well, you’re made of sunshine, and you didn’t have enough room to grow in Lannet, but I thought that maybe you could plant yourself in the stars...not necessarily to put down roots, but to be closer to the sun and to have the light of comets and nebulae and quasars and everything shining down on you. I thought that maybe then you’d be nourished. You’d have room to grow...and flower...and bloom. I’m very sorry; I feel like I just transferred you from one crappy pot to another. I wanted to make you happy, but I didn’t.”

 

“I wanted me to be happy too,” says Alison, “but, well, I haven’t. I wanted me to be safe and whole and happy, and I know that both of you did too; I mean, we even signed a contract saying that we would be good and kind and helpful to each other. And we have kept each other as safe and whole and happy as possible, but -- “

 

“I made a mistake,” says the Doctor in a very low voice.

 

“Shh!” says Alison’s robot. “The Domina is talking.”

 

“I know you made a mistake, Doctor,” says Alison, swallowing a few times [don’t cry!], “but that doesn’t discount the fact that we’ve been doing everything we could to live up to the contract. Even then, we couldn’t account for outside factors beyond our control, and that was the bullshit that fucked me up. I left Earth because I thought I might get _away_ from the bullshit, but it just came around on me with a vengeance.”

 

“Domina…” Her robot says her name as if he’s touching her with it, as if it’s part of his body with which he holds her fast.

 

“Both of my adventures throughout all the intergalactic possibilities of space and time have been...rape,” says Alison, her voice scraped flat. “I know there’s more out there in the universe than bullshit, but I need... I need to go home for a while...to my parents’ house. I need to rest inside my own head without anyone mind-fucking it. I don’t want to, but… Hold me tighter!” she requests, and her robot does. Maybe he’ll hold her so hard that he’ll keep the tears from falling out her eyes. “I’m going to miss you, all of you, so much.”

 

“Me too, Alison,” says the Doctor. “Me and Anima and all the TARDIS cats are going to miss you.”

 

“Ah, Domina _carissima,”_ says her robot with a sigh, “I am glad to have known you, even for such a brief time, for, in that time, you have made me…” A pause, then he says in her ear, “--Yours.”

 

“Oh… But… I thought… I can’t...come back?” Alison shivers violently. “But...I want to…”

 

“What? Who gave you that silly idea? Who said you couldn’t come back?” The Doctor sounds indignant. “Yes, you can! --I mean, if you want to.” Alison feels a sideways movement through her as the Doctor gives her robot a shove of reproach. “Don’t scare her like that, Master!”

 

“I apologize,” says the Magister to Alison. “I was remiss in assuming that you would not wish to return. You are always welcome with me -- with us.”

 

“Hah!” Alison fastens herself around him. “You thought you could escape your Domina, huh? I’m going to come back and hold you fast, whether you like it or not!”

 

“Mmm, I think he’ll like it,” observes the Doctor.

 

“But...before I go...do you think all three of us could do something fun together,” Alison asks, “that doesn’t involve aliens fucking around with the contents of my skull?”

 


End file.
